Vocational training measures in French-speaking Belgium assessed

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In March 1999, the advisory Council for Education and Training for the francophone part of Belgium - which comprises representatives from the education and training sector and the social partners - adopted an opinion on the development of continuing vocational training. The Council proposes a series of recommendations to be implemented through collective bargaining.

The Council for Education and Training (Conseil de l'Education et de la Formation, CEF) of the French Community of Belgium is an advisory body made up of two committees - one for education and one for vocational training. Representatives are drawn from the social partners, the regional public vocational training authorities, the Vocational Training Institute for the Self-employed (Institut de Formation des Classes moyennes), the Higher Council for Continuing Education (Conseil supérieur de l'Education permanente), agricultural training institutes, school authorities, parents' associations, universities and higher-education students. In March 1999, the Council adopted an opinion on the objectives of continuing vocational training (Les objectifs de la formation professionnelle continue, Opinion No. 64).

The opinion notes that in Belgium, in accordance with European Union Directives on the updating of initial and continuing training, intersectoral collective agreements have since 1989 laid down that a proportion of the paybill should go to the training of "groups at risk". In 1999, the social partners have undertaken gradually to increase their training efforts in order to reach the average level of the three main neighbouring countries (France, Germany and the Netherlands).

In the French Community, there are also rules governing, although not always in a very coordinated fashion, the four major categories of training provider: "social advancement" education (enseignement de promotion sociale); public organisations for the vocational training of jobseekers and workers; those providing combined work/training scheme; and the voluntary sector.

Paradoxes and inconsistencies identified

The Council's opinion sets out its analysis of training provision, noting a number of perceived paradoxes and inconsistencies:

• continuing vocational training is less and less a means of advancing a career, or keeping or finding a job, though it is more and more associated with those activities;

• vocational training has entered a "service economy" where state action is predominant as it is "the legislator, financier, producer, seller and consumer of training ... It concludes contracts with intermediary bodies to organise the response to its needs". Accordingly, it can no longer play its regulatory role properly or guarantee quality;

• there is difficulty in achieving complementarity between initial training and continuing vocational training, as the two systems are sometimes in competition with each other. People with the lowest levels of initial education demand less vocational training or have greater difficulty in keeping up with it. However, employment levels and the level of training still remain closely linked on the labour market because, insofar as the standard of requirements for a job has increased and it is necessary to be better educated to keep the same job, the school certificate is losing its value;

• there is an increase in both the number of qualified people and the number of those experiencing difficulty getting jobs, particularly permanent ones;

• more and more wide-ranging aims are assigned to continuing vocational training - such as fighting unemployment, promoting labour market integration and improving mobility and adaptability to change - while its increasingly diversified forms of implementation make the evaluation and comparison of the various measures more difficult;

• continuing vocational training is viewed less and less as an individual right. It is seen as a means of increasing "potential employability" while it confers no right to promotion and offers no help in finding a job. Companies are reluctant to train their own employees, particularly shopfloor workers. Moreover, they rarely invest in vocational training for unemployed people. The type of vocational training on offer varies according to whether it is targeted at workers in "core" jobs, in "peripheral" jobs or at those out of the labour market (perhaps in the long term); and

• training courses are becoming more diversified and "professionalised" while the legal and institutional framework of vocational training prevents proper evaluation of the providers' objectives and the proper management of the system, and sometimes leads field providers to take responsibility for target groups for which they were not prepared.

Recommendations

Given these considerations, the Council for Education and Training defines two main objectives for vocational training: the reduction of inequalities on the labour market; and the adaptation of workforce skills to the evolving nature of work. The first objective can, it says, be achieved by developing a more democratic access to initial and continuing training and by promoting "access and control of individual job mobility" on both internal and external labour markets by means of a widely recognised system of skills certification. The second objective can be achieved through a continuous development of certification coupled with medium-term evaluation.

The CEF believes that the individual right's to continuing vocational training must be restored, including general training and training for citizenship. Everyone must be given "a taste for learning", it says, by introducing positive discrimination in initial education and vocational training systems. One must "start from people's aspirations rather than institutional needs ... developing general knowledge and specialised know-how rather than ignoring their interactions".

Vocational training should once again become an issue in collective bargaining through integrating training policies with employment strategies and extending them, through collective agreements, to workers with insecure and atypical jobs. Training should come closer to the company, but combined work/training programmes are not widely developed in Belgium and companies are reluctant to get involved in the training process.

The Council therefore wants the social partners to invent "an original type of relationship between industry, education and training". This could be a link between initial training and continuing vocational training which would ensure "consistency between these two fields and develop a coordinated and updated database on jobs and skills to lay down the conditions for official recognition and a stable form of relationship".

The Council also recommends that the principle of quality control be added to existing rules in order to help regulate the training market, which is becoming increasingly competitive. The systems of vocational training financing and trainers' functions and qualifications should also be revised, states the Council. Finally, it wants to add meaning to the concept of the "learning organisation" which it sees as a state of mind: since the company cannot guarantee permanent employment any more, it should at least guarantee workers' employability.

Commentary

The Council for Education and Training is trying to reflect, though sometimes in a contradictory manner, the various demands to which vocational training is meant to respond. In a context of qualitatively and quantitatively worsening employment, vocational training is leading, curiously enough, to the exclusion of the least trained while providing no - or almost no - guarantee of security for workers with jobs. This is basically because, declares the Council, the supply of vocational training adapts itself to categories of beneficiaries not according to their real needs but according to providers' representation of those needs: for the providers, there is a category of beneficiaries who are "off the labour market on a long-term basis" and one of "people destined for permanent job insecurity". This view reflects various social tensions underlying continuing vocational training as well as the conflicting interests of the parties involved: companies, public authorities, training professionals and trainees.

If, in its conclusions, the Council repeats that continuing vocational training cannot solve everything on its own, its proposed solutions are exclusively technical and in some cases little more than just good intentions. The Council, for instance, wants "a generally recognised system of skills certification (obtained by) agreement between the state, the various public training providers and the social partners". However, it is hard to see how companies could accept the imposition of rules which would restrict their recruitment requirements and how those rules could then be enforced. There are no such binding rules in Belgium or in the French Community. (Adinda Vanheerswynghels, Centre de Sociologie du Travail, de l'Emploi et de la Formation, Université Libre de Bruxelle)