For years, it seemed unlikely, but vocational training has reached its peak. Even the FP we know today. In the 2023–24 academic year, almost 150,000 places are offered to study vocational training in the Community of Valencia, but the final enrollment is 114,000 people. In other words, 34,042 positions are vacant, according to data provided by the Ministry of Education.
This is the first year they have filled too many vacant positions, and the administration takes good account of it because there are some cycles with endless waiting lists and others that do not fill the places.
So he started designing a plan to adjust the supply of grades for opportunities in the labor market and to promote and rework degrees that do not have much traction among students. The key, as explained by the department directed by José Antonio Rovira, is to improve the role of the IES advisor.
Some of the most requested FPs and more than a thousand students that remain on the waiting list are Safety and Environment, Physical and Sports Activities, and Image and Sound. They all have problems; the demand for positions is disproportionate to the jobs absorbed by the market. Even with the current vacancies, it is difficult for all students to find a job.
For this reason, Education began to study the map of vocational training to see if it was possible to replace these positions with others with greater demand and workability. Despite everything, he clarified that “enrolled students have the right to end the cycle, and that is guaranteed.” The key to education is not to create more students who will not be absorbed into the labor market, but to balance supply and demand.
Work that never ends the cycle
On the other hand, IT FP is also one of the most requested, but it creates a lot of work. In fact, Education is considering expanding it further.
In this cycle, there are also vacancies. Of the 18,960 places offered, almost 3,000 are unfilled. In the long cycle alone, nearly 1,300 were left empty. But it is not about the lack of students; as explained by the Ministry of Education, most of them are already hired in the second year, before the end of the cycle, with jobs of between 1,200 and 1,500 euros with the possibility to grow, and they decided to leave classes to work.
There are also FPs with multiple exits, but for some reason they don’t have students or they still need to be filled.Enrollment says that education is about power. Two of them are DAW (Web Application Design) and DAM (Cross-Platform Application Design). Education, however, makes it clear that it will be studied carefully in each case and will base itself above all on the criterion of employability.
What else to try promoting the department is a good professional guidance service “so that all people can create their own professional itinerary and guide them towards the cycles with the most employment opportunities.”
Job opportunities
According to the latest study by Caixabank Dualiza, FP, the three industries that will create more job opportunities in the coming years are health (16,831), administration and management (15,658), and IT and communications (13,754). On the other hand, the ones that generate the fewest jobs are hospitality and tourism (4,463) and physical and sports activities (4,583).
In the last eight years, students studying vocational training grew by 37% to nearly 120,000 students enrolled. In addition, the last two legislatures have increased the teaching staff by 50%, from 5,000 to 8,300 teachers.
The report also shows how FPs have changed from 2016 to now, and the reality is that the training is longer. In 2021, most of the students enrolled are in Higher Degree (46.1%), followed by Intermediate Degree (43.3%), and Basic FP (10.7%). In total, there are now 110,035 people enrolled in the Valencian FP, five thousand more than in 2016 (95,256). In Spain, higher vocational training already represents more than half of the studies (51.5%).
The study provides data on job offers that require a degree in vocational training and shows that one out of every five opportunities created throughout eCONOMY is for vocational training. Specifically, for 21.9% of the job offers, a higher vocational training degree is required, and for 19%, a middle-level vocational training degree is required.
