The president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, signed this Thursday the Canary Islands Dual Vocational Training Strategy 2022-2026 with the heads of employers' associations and unions with the aim of accelerating the transition towards a model of continuous education more linked to employment contracts.
Torres pointed out that with this measure "the Canary Islands becomes the first autonomous community to agree on this pioneering document with coherent proposals to fit the Law of Organization and Integration of Vocational Training thanks to public-private collaboration through social dialogue".
Through the strategic text of the Concertation Table, progress is being made in the punctual fulfillment of the various objectives of the organic law, such as identifying the professional skills of the labor market, ensuring an ideal training offer, enabling the acquisition of new skills and promoting a service of guidance and professional accompaniment.
The goal is that all Vocational Training in the Canary Islands has a dual character, thus combining teaching and learning processes in alternating regime between the training center and the company. The document signed today aims to qualify the young population in order to facilitate their professional integration.
"The young people of the Canary Islands have been suffering for many years from unemployment figures that are unsustainable," explains the president, who is confident that this strategy will help maintain the downward trend in unemployment among people under 25 years of age after five months of the labor reform, a decrease that in May was 12% compared to April.
For her part, Minister Elena Máñez stressed that this strategy contemplates among its main purposes improving the qualification of people and the competitiveness of companies, in addition to adapting specialized training to the immediate needs of the Canary Islands market.
"We have to be more agile in better adjusting what companies need and how training has to adapt to those needs, because it is the companies that generate employment," she adds. During the presentation, emphasis was also placed on the fact that training should be linked to activities related to the blue economy, digital transformation, energy transition, creative industries or the care economy.
Finally, Torres wanted to emphasize that this is a commitment that is among the goals of the Canary Islands Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030, and reflected that "since 2020 the dual VET groups have doubled, from 103 groups to the 205 that there will be next year", for which there are already a thousand collaborating companies.
He also recalled that last year was the first in which the Government of the Canary Islands activated scholarships for Dual VET students with 500,000 euros, "an amount that for next year will be quintupled with more than 3 million euros", he points out.
