Joel Vallés, 27, studies in the educational complex of Cheste, a kind of small city of almost 9,000 inhabitants of brutalist architectural style that the Franco regime built 20 kilometers from Valencia, whose concrete structures can be seen in the middle of the field from the highway that goes to Madrid. His case is an example of the great job recycling that is taking place in Spain through Vocational Training (FP). Vallés studied high school, dropped out of a higher level of Sound FP, worked for five years in a loudspeaker factory, and, when the pandemic hit, decided that he was going to change his life. “I wanted to find a better job, something that I liked. I saw that the labor market was a disaster if I did not have a good qualification to support me, beyond high school, and, taking advantage of ERTE first and then unemployment, I began to study a higher degree in Forest Management ”. Vallés wants to appear for environmental agent competitive examinations. If that can’t be done, you plan to try other exits that have in common being outdoor jobs.
There are at least 225,000 VET students who are 25 years old or over (the figure is from the 2019-2020 academic year, the last for which data can be consulted by age, but the number today should be closer to 250,000 of the total million students that has reached the FP, since for years the percentage of students of that age group who study the stage has been around 25% of the total). In the 2011-2012 academic year there were 146,168.
The FP has experienced a great growth of students since then, which has been 35% in the middle cycles and 86% in the higher, while in high school it has barely increased by 2%. And those over 24 years of age have gained a bit of weight with respect to the total number of students: they represented 24% in the 2011-2012 academic year and 25% in the 2019-2020. In the latter, without counting Basic FP, which is the itinerary designed for kids who are doing poorly to finish Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO), the percentage reached 28%. And among distance learning cycle students, 82%.
Félix Hinojal, head of night studies at the Giner de los Ríos institute in the Madrid town of Alcobendas, points out that, in parallel, in the last decade the enrollment of the high school for adults has plummeted due to the legal changes that have facilitated direct access to training cycles through entrance exams.
Ismael Sanz, professor of Applied Economics at the Rey Juan Carlos University, mentions three factors to explain the success of VET among students aged 25 or over. “One is the improvement of the prestige of the VET, which has been modernized a lot. Another is that when job opportunities are scarce, as has happened in recent years, it is normal for the interest in retraining through vocational training to increase, which has good job placement data ”. The third factor, adds Sanz, is related to the relative sophistication of the labor market or, at the very least, to the greater competition now found by untrained workers. In 2010, the percentage of the population aged 25 to 34 who had, at most, ESO stood at 35%. By 2020, it was down to 28%.
The old times
At the age of 17, Javier Feijóo, who is now 37, dropped out of high school. “I worked in different sectors. At that time there was work on many things. I was a production operator in several companies, as a waiter, in the Ferrol shipyard. Until, with the previous crisis and the difficulty of keeping a job and finding another that was not in worse conditions, in 2015 I decided to go back to study ”. He did a medium cycle of Electromechanical Maintenance, went to work at Alcoa’s aluminum plant in A Coruña, and shortly before the start of the pandemic, when the American multinational sold the plant, he was again unemployed. In 2020 he began a higher cycle of Industrial Robotics at the Ferrolterra integrated VET center, in Ferrol, and will shortly begin paid internships in a company.
At the same institute, Susana García, 29, is doing a middle cycle of Carpentry after having worked in the hotel industry and other unskilled jobs. “I had not studied for 11 years and it took me a bit to get used to it, but now I am super happy. I think I have my future half planned, “he says.
The profile of VET students over 24 years of age is, however, varied. David Crego, head of training cycles at the Juan de Mairena institute in San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), assures that in his center, specialized in VET health studies, the most common is that of workers who want to improve their situation in the sector. Either to be promoted, or because they are performing functions without the qualification that was already legally mandatory or that is beginning to be required of them. “This is the case, for example, of caregivers in nursing homes who study the middle cycle of Auxiliary Nursing Care”, he comments.
And at the Ferrolterra de Ferrol institute, its director, Enrique Pazo, sees more and more people with university degrees who enroll in higher vocational training to improve their job opportunities. One of them is Rubén López, 30, who studied Geomatics and Topography Engineering and after a while without finding “quality jobs” of his own, he enrolled in the cycle in Industrial Mechatronics, did an internship at the public company Navantia and he stayed working on it. Another example is that of Raúl Cabarcos, who is a mining engineer, is 43 years old and is studying for a higher degree in Communication and Information Systems. “Vocational Training does not beat around the bush with so many theoretical tools. If I could go back, I would not stop going to the University, but I would do a FP first ”.
More responsible students
Director Enrique Pazo, whose institute is focused on industrial studies, assures that among distance students, who are mostly over 24 years old and combine the cycle with work, the dropout rate is high. “They get it around 50% after two, three or four years, because they start to break it down.”
And María Martorell, head of studies at the Antoni Maura institute, in Mallorca, and a teacher of the higher cycle of Early Childhood Education, assures that, due to her experience, female students over 24 years of age (there is hardly any male presence in the degree) tend to be “more responsible”. “They have an experience and an attitude that is very noticeable in the practices, the nursery schools tell us when we follow up. The youngest students, who are almost in their teens and in many cases use the cycle as a bridge to later complete a university degree in education, sometimes they do not go, because, for example, they get sick, and they do not warn, because they consider that needless”.
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