One in five workers in the Region accumulates work with studies. Many are university students who pay for their studies by putting drinks in a bar or work hours in a commercial establishment that supplements its workforce with employees hired on reduced hours. But there are also employees with a stable job who, when they leave their company, go to university or to a vocational training institute to obtain a diploma enabling them to acquire the preparation they need. to improve their professional situation or to be able to change jobs. Others go to adult education centers to get the official title they didn’t get because they hung up the books early.
With two public universities, one private and a UNED headquarters in Cartagena, the Region is one of the Autonomous Communities with a higher proportion of employed people working and studying. 18.6% of workers spend part of their free time continuing to train, according to data collected by the Adecco Monitor.
Knowing that there are currently nearly 660,000 people employed in the Region, the number of workers who have to bend their elbows at the end of their shift would exceed 120,000.
Navarre, which reaches 21%, is the autonomous community in which there are more employed people who combine study and work, while Castilla-La Mancha (13.1%) and Extremadura (13.9%) appear in the last positions.
The secretary general of the CC OO Education Federation, Nacho Tornel, explains that “workers return to vocational training centers to complete a module”. He assures that there are people who “reduce their working hours, because they need to obtain a qualification to continue working”.
In other cases, it is workers who need to improve their training to acquire new knowledge and recycling skills.
He criticizes the fact that the Community leaves VET in the hands of private initiative, despite the fact that there are institutes like Juan Carlos I in Murcia, which have received thousands of applications from students who have found themselves without square.
“The demand for training is increasing”, which is why he believes that VET is not sufficiently developed to meet the needs of young people and active workers who want to prepare to work in emerging sectors, such as renewable energy.
Tornel adds that many are “returning to adult training centers” to obtain a diploma allowing them to open up to new job opportunities.
The Ministry of Education assures that for the academic year 2022-2023 these centers offer 14,672 places throughout the Region. Of these, 12,480 are intended for lessons given in person in the 16 adult education centers and in the 68 classrooms moved from these same centres.
For the Adult Baccalaureate, there are 1,787 positions in ten secondary education institutesin addition to 405 other secondary distance learning courses taught in two institutes.
In addition to basic training, Spanish lessons are also provided for immigrants who need to learn the language able to work and improve their chances of integration. The Ministry assures that this year it has expanded the places for foreigners in Torre Pacheco.
The secretary general of CC OO, Santiago Navarro, points out that there are large commercial chains that recruit part of their workers among students who have to work to pay for their studies and who “take advantage” of the availability offered by this group for “give them two or three hour contracts, which then turn into eight or nine days”.
Navarro recalls that the hotel industry is another of the sectors in which there is a greater proportion of workers who study, despite the fact that salaries are far from those paid in neighboring towns, such as La Torre de la Horadada. “There are professional categories with a difference of 300 euros”he rocks.
For the secretary general of the UGT, Antonio Jiménez, the need to reconcile work and studies is due to the situation of families, “who have no salary to pay for their children’s studies”. Jiménez remembers that he himself had all kinds of jobs during his studies, “from the cannery to the pharmacy”.
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