Contributions to cartography of continuing vocational training in Portugal

a statistical analysis of recent trends in promotion and access to training

Abstract

Vocational training has experienced significant development in Portugal, particularly since Portugal joined the European Union, as a result of the availability of Community funds to support the development of human capital and the progressive change in the competitiveness factors on which it has been based. Portuguese economy. The first reason is associated with the requirements arising from the need to ensure the good execution of public funds, in accordance with the legal norms that fit these same funds, which, as Almeida et al. (2008) refer, led to the development of a set of structures that have significantly increased installed capacity to carry out training projects. Regarding the second reason, although it can not be dissociated from the first, it is due to the effects of a greater exposure of the Portuguese economy to international competition, as a result of the deepening and enlargement of the European internal market and of globalization, where the human capital becomes an integral part of the strategies of competitive development of companies and modernization of society against the traditional model based on cheap and disqualified labor (Kovács, 2002).
In this context, despite the cleavages that cross investment and access to training in the Portuguese business structure as a whole, as well as the overvaluation of reactive training policies oriented to short-term needs (Lopes, 2000 and Almeida, 2007 and Bernardes, 2008), vocational training has been called to play a strategic role in supporting the competitive development of companies as well as in promoting the employability of workers (Rodrigues, 2016). The provision of public funds to promote a national training policy more suited to socio-economic needs, coupled with a greater awareness of corporate managers as regards the need to promote dynamic factors of competitiveness through the development of human capital, has been to make the training volume increase over the last decades (Estevão et al, sd and Almeida and Alves, 2014).
Based on this general framework, which has undergone transformations in the world of vocational training in Portugal, it is the objective of this communication to analyze and discuss the set of quantitative transformations that have taken place in the panorama of continuing vocational training in Portugal with a view to drawing up a cartography of vocational training at the level of Portuguese business fabric. For this, we used secondary statistical data available by the MTSSS for the year 2014 and calculated from the Single Report of the companies.