The Stubborn Trainers vs. The Neoliberal Economists: How Will Training Survive the Battle?
By Claudio de Moura Castro (06/98, EDU-106, En, Es) See also Education, Training and Science & Technology
Not long ago most Latin American countries had systems of training which were considered very interesting, original and well performing. Starting with the Brazilian SENAI more than fifty years ago, they introduced creative solutions to training and served the region well. But the economies of the region have changed faster than most of them could cope with and intellectual fashion has lead to policies that threaten their existence. This paper reviews the evolution in training policies and its impact on the training systems of the region.
When Latin American training institutions were created, the problems of training were mostly on the supply side. The market would hire as many graduates as the schools could produce and trainers were concerned with training materials, training of trainers, and funds to pay for increasingly large and heavy systems.
Alas, this is no longer true. The economic troubles which started with the oil crisis in the seventies and culminated with the "lost decade" of the eighties changed forever the landscape of training. While training remains as important as ever, obtaining a good fit between supply and demand has become the number one challenge for trainers. Indeed, this is the area in which training institutions are most vulnerable to criticism.
Gone is the heroic era of supply worries and attempts to train more and more students while improving quality. Now, training institutions have to struggle with elusive markets. Worse, the incentives to earnestly pursue this mystifying fit are often absent. We enter the era of demand-driven training, since adjusting to demand should be the main concern. But the world of demand-driven training is not so simple.
This paper deals with real world problems in the era of demand-driven training. The first section chronicles the birth and development of the Latin American training systems, followed by the beginning of their troubles and the collapse of the supply-driven training model. But demand-driven training is not easy to achieve, and the Latin American training institutions demur, dodge and procrastinate the difficult adjustment required to redeploy their efforts to new markets and to the informal sector. The second section of this report shows that Latin American governments are responding to the inertia of training institutions by radically changing their approach. Instead of trying to control institutions by administrative means, there is a tendency to implement a system of contract training, so as to have a more forceful impact on what is offered. The last section of the paper speculates on what may happen when stubborn and heavy institutions face the threat of losing their budgets.
Last updated: 05/08/07
