By Gabriel Sanchez Zinny

Argentina faces great challenges to make its economy more modern, improve its security, become part of the world again and expand talent. Each of these challenges must be achieved within a knowledge society with phenomenon such as the internet of things and the shared economy, which impact the labour market, where the competition for talent is global and where young people will change jobs more than 15 times during their professional careers.

The country used to be a leader in terms of education in Latin America. Both in the college and the technical levels, Argentina used to set trends in terms of access and educational quality. But for several decades now, and as international exams demonstrate it, the country has a long way to go as regards graduation rates for middle, technical and college education and in the quality for each of these levels.

The Minister of Education, Esteban Bullrich is leading a new discussion about the quality of education and social mobility in the country, where, no matter where they come from, every person may access the best public school where he/she gets training for life and for work.  As a matter of fact, there is plenty of room to develop training for labour. There are over 600.000 students attending technical high schools, around 200.000 attending technical training schools and over 400.000 students enrolled in professional training centres. These institutions are supported by the National Institute of Technological Education (INET), which depends on the Ministry of Education and Sports. All in all, these figures are very small, particularly when compared to the total population that needs training for employment and that has not graduated from high school or had no chance to attend college.

In Argentina, the investment for university is twice the investment made for technical-professional education. This is something we need to discuss as a country because only 10% of college students do actually graduate every year.

There are 20 million adults with no university degree who are not enrolled in the education system but who represent an essential part of the working population and need continuous training to keep on making progress in their professional careers and to work in a 21^st century that demands different soft and hard skills, to adapt to an economy where technological changes are deeper and more frequent.

The Argentinian State has several ministries and offices focused on professional training and employment programs that could be enhanced with a common mission and action aiming to provide these capacities for work to those who have graduated from a superior level education cycle and need to keep updated, as well as for those who lack the basis of the formal system or are completely outside the system.

To recover competitiveness in Argentina, human talent is vital, particularly technical professional talent, which is an essential part of the productive development as can be seen in countries such as Germany, Australia or Japan. That is what we are aiming for at INET, building over what has already been built, particularly considering the Law on technical-professional education enacted in 2005, and seeking to link the educational supply to the labour markets’ demands.  As Minister Bullrich explained: “we want to develop regional economies and to link technical schools to those economies”.

An economy that is competitive, open to the world and has high potential of growth shall demand investment on human capital and wider access to education for every social sector, which was achieved during the past few years, but it also needs higher academic quality levels and, most importantly, higher levels of employability, of connecting people to the productive world.

Gabriel Sanchez Zinny is Executive Direct of INET

Source: La Nación