The future of vocational training in Latin America and the Caribbean: overview and strengthening guidelines

This report contains an overview of the advances, backwardness and gaps in vocational training in Latin America and the Caribbean, and explains several related statements including: (a) vocational training must be aligned 'in real time' with productive development policies (PDPs) and the needs of the productive sector; (b) to make this possible, it is necessary to strengthen public-private partnerships and tripartite participation, to explore new forms of this partnership, as well as innovations in the implementation of resources for training the workforce; (c) what is true for vocational training also applies to all human resource training processes, including formal education; and (d) vocational training and academic education should not be treated as alternatives from which to choose, but as supplementary instruments with many paths for coming and going between education, vocational training and work during the working lives of the people. Most of the above will not be attained with traditional management and planning models. There is a need for public-private partnership mechanisms that incorporate workers and allow for quick adjustments and expeditious implementation of resources.

Although this report focuses on vocational training, it is crucial to point out that academic education must also be notably seen as training for work. It is not, of course, a matter of reducing education to training for work, but of ensuring that the perspective of work is ever present, and not only in technical colleges or in dual education schemes in which classroom learning is combined with apprenticeships under the supervision of qualified staff in companies.

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