Mexico Sets Itself a Vocational Challenge

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In Mexico’s rigid social hierarchy, holders of bachelors’ degrees revel in the deference the title licenciado bestows.

However, the skills the country needs to attack its stagnant productivity are largely the ones that come from unsexy — and thus unpopular — vocational courses.

It is time for an image overhaul, believes Dieter Holtz, president of Laureate Education in Mexico. Laureate operates two prominent private universities: the Universidad del Valle de México and the Universidad Tecnológica de México, which offer four-year degrees and MBAs, as well as two-year technical programmes.

Only about 3 to 4 per cent of students choose these two-year programmes, well below Chile’s level of some 55 to 60 per cent, Mr Holtz says — and yet the opportunities they open up are huge.

“The main automotive company chief executives in Mexico agree that they could easily hire hundreds of technical people every year if we were to produce them — that would save eight months of on-the-job training.

“About 30 per cent of people in the 18-24 age bracket are currently studying for undergraduate degrees [in Mexico]. But what about the other 70 per cent?”

The talent shortage is acute across Latin America, according to a survey last year by ManpowerGroup, but Mexico’s two decades of disappointing productivity and the huge opportunities opened up by its historic energy reform make training staff with the right technical skills especially urgent.

At a conference in Mexico City this month, Laureate gathered experts and officials together, including former US president Bill Clinton and Inter-American Development Bank chief executive Luis Alberto Moreno, to discuss how to make vocational training more desirable and push it up the national policy agenda.

The plan sounds like a no-brainer, but it is a tricky pitch. Most promising initiatives are being piloted at a local level.

In the northwest state of Jalisco, for example, innovation minister Jaime Reyes Robles is running a series of measures, including a German model of “dual” education, in which students only spend a quarter of their time in lectures and the rest in the private sector.

Mr Reyes Robles’ 35 years in business — 20 as a senior Hewlett-Packard executive and 15 at Kodak — have prepared him well for this job.

“In the private sector, we are used to working at a different speed,” he says. “This is urgent. It’s not about making six-year plans but about resolving practical problems.”

As a result, professors are also seconded to companies “to understand these two worlds which have lived separately for so long,” Mr Reyes Robles explains.

“We want to have 80 per cent employability — graduates finding jobs in their fields . . . Now, it is 43 per cent. This is a huge waste of money.

The state of Jalisco, which contributes more than 6 per cent of Mexico’s GDP, is also seeking to tailor MBAs and postgraduate courses more closely to the state’s needs by having students and professors focus their research on solving real problems.

Ariel Fiszbein, an education expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, sees few incentives for institutions to offer employment-friendly technical courses. Funding, especially of public universities, is not linked to results or employment, he notes.

But courses could be made more attractive to students in Mexico, most of whom study at private higher education institutions. According to Doug Becker, chief executive of Laureate Education worldwide, which has more than 80 institutions in 29 countries: “You could say, ‘We are going to offer loan programmes, but only for students in engineering and science’.”

Time is of the essence as Mexico struggles to reverse a looming talent gap and the prospect of yet more below-potential growth. “This is a real challenge,” says Mr Fiszbein.

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