The voluntary engagement of adults in vocational education: more difficult or more constrained? The case of France

Fabienne Berton (1) , Mario Correia (2)

1 CRF - Centre de recherche sur la formation
2 LGF - Laboratoire Georges Friedmann

The access of adults to higher education has been significantly changed during the last period in France. But the overall change also reflects some different and sometime contradictory tendencies. Two facts can be pointed: 1) Firstly, vocational education appears more and more to be a necessity for those that know some difficulties in their professional situation. Traditionally, the Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers (Cnam) vocation is devoted to social and professional ascending mobility. Today then, an increasing part of Cnam population is composed of learners that are unemployed or in difficulties on the labour markets: they must job or profession change, 2) But, by the same time, the access to vocational education become more and more complicated for the workers that are not personally concerned with some professional difficulties. Self-engagement in vocational education becomes more and more often a bound and its positive effects are not guaranteed. These effects depend on numerous bargaining and/or agreement between individuals and their professional as well as personal environment. It also depends on the individual capacity to engage some various resources. A survey has been conducted with 2500 Cnam learners that are ended or stopped their training in 1998 and some surveys previously conducted. All this permits us to understand how there new tendencies, which are related to the labour market structure as well as to the manpower management of the firms: * Modify the condition of access of adults to vocational education, * Deeply change the professional and training trajectory of learners that are effectively engaged in some vocational education.

L'accès des adultes aux programmes de formation ou d'études supérieures subit de profondes transformations qui sont en grande partie contradictoires : l'accès des salariés aux programmes de formation habituellement réservés aux jeunes en formation initiale se généralise dans les universités à tous les niveaux des cursus ; la formation apparaît de plus en plus une obligation pour tous ceux qui se trouvent en difficulté dans leur situation professionnelle. Dans les dispositifs de "promotion sociale" comme ceux du CNAM, la part de adultes en reconversion professionnelle augmente fortement. D'un autre côté, l'accès à la formation des salariés qui ne se trouvent pas en difficulté se complique. A partir d'une enquête réalisée auprès de 2500 auditeurs du CNAM et de comparaisons avec les enquêtes précédentes, nous montrons comment les nouvelles contraintes, qui touchent au marché du travail et à la gestion des carrières dans les entreprises, modifient l'accès des adultes aux programmes de formation et les parcours des auditeurs qui sont inscrits en formation. L'entrée en formation devient dans de nombreux cas une obligation dont les résultats positifs ne sont pas assurés. Ces résultats dépendent de multiples négociations entre l'individu et son environnement et de la capacité de l'individu à mobiliser des ressources variées.

Mots clés: Reconversion professionnelle; Enquête; Cnam; Parcours formation; Éducation permanente; Accès formation

Domaines: Sociologie

Fabienne Berton, Mario Correia. The voluntary engagement of adults in vocational education: more difficult or more constrained? The case of France. ESREA Access Network Conférence: Doors wide shut? The access of adults, past, present and future, ESREA, Sep 2000, Barcelone, Espagne. 17 p. ⟨hal-00665400⟩