Contenu du sommaire : Former demain

To reflect on the future, the author confines herself to that aspect of training based on the meeting between a professional and people in search of development, a place, knowledge. She considers the dimensions around which her present anxiety is centered : concern for relationship, of a self in relation to another considered as a subject ; care for a meeting, an accompaniment, a temporality necessary to think and reflect ; maintenance of sensitivity and quality. Rather than projecting into the future, she retains what needs to be saved, even if an element of transformation is necessary. It is the verb to preserve that the author conjugates. With a double question : can we prevent, or flag as dangerous, certain developments that are considered destructive of human beings ? How could adult education contribute ?

Based on an analysis of the themes treated by the journal Education Permanente since its creation, this article proposes an « archeology » of the modes of design of the training actions and actions in training, inscribed in a more global evolution of the design of the relations between construction and mobilization of social subjects. Three modes, which have emerged successivelybut which coexist, are distinguished : constructing oneself in order to be able to be mobilized ; constructing oneself by mobilizing oneself ; mobilizing oneself in order to construct oneself. These modes of articulation are recognizable, beyond the training of adults, in all professions aimed at helping others.

In order to obtain medium-term prospects for the potential evolutions of training professions, the author adopts Henri Lefebvre's regressive-progressive method. Starting from the present day situation, this method searches the past for the conditions of its appearance and then extrapolates to the future. At present, training professions are characterized by a strong segmentation of the professional space. Their past has given rise to a debate around the acceptance or refusal of professionalization. Their future presages inflections rather than revolutions, and the advent of digital technology will not change at all what adult training means.

In France, vocational training has been marked by a multiform institutionalization that has altered all collective and individual learning processes compared to other countries. The role accorded to administrative regulation in the post-school sphere has in particular resulted in a devaluation of educational initiatives originating from civil society, professional communities or trade unions. Successive reforms have fragmented the goals of adult education, despite a large budget that is in fact a heterogeneous mix of fundings, more the reflection of wishful thinking than of a homogeneous and ambitious policy. Today, the issue of ecology and the need to combine technological innovations and social innovations imply a reappropriation, within the system of production, of the challenges of the development of knowledge and skills, and while the recognition of training actions in the workplace is a promising signal, their implementation, in a spirit of reappropriation, cannot be taken for granted.

The French law « for the freedom to choose one's professional future » has upset the training system and the organization of apprenticeship, insofar as it accentuates individualization and the aim of professionalization. By making the employer and the professional branches the ultimate decision makers, by making management by skills the alpha and the omega of the system, it is to be feared that the free choice which this law claims to offer employee is no more than words in the air. The focus of training around purely economic concerns pre-empts the future of lifelong education.

Vocational training is in perpetual change yet the creation of added value for citizens and people in employment remains an issue. However, some situations of immobility, and some recurring questions lead to doubt about the reality of continued progress. In such a context, what is to be expected in the next ten years ? What initiatives, what signs, can legitimately be put under close surveillance to try to imagine training in 2030 ? Certain constants and certain hypotheses lead the authors to envisage some scenarios, not to undergo but to continue to act in the name of their convictions.

In the society of acceleration, adult education has developed significantly by fulfilling two essential functions : meeting the economic needs of society and allowing those who have not had the opportunity to pursue a course of study to do so. In today's advanced society, these two functions have been maintained, but a new dimension has been added, that of the aspiration to resonance. It is through these theoretical referents of acceleration, modernity and resonance that adult training is analyzed in this article.

More than ever before one hears injunctions to « train oneself ». In this context, and building on the humanist foundations that it laid down over fifty years ago, self-training remains, like the very idea of lifelong education, a subject of surprising actuality. Still, one should not consider that self-training is limited to the injunction to « fend for oneself », any more than the idea of « lifelong training » be limited to a simple production of skills. Both are aimed at the same horizon : a project for society as much as a project for all members of society.

To continue to exist, training organizations will be forced to adopt a logic of investment, and therefore to change their economic model. They will have to be able to look for funds that will enable them to finance their educational and logistical investments. Whether these funds be part of major public policies (skills investment plans, European and regional funds, etc.), or come from the foundations of large companies, from crowdfunding, from shareholding or from bank loans, they will always be aimed at financing their research and development activity. From the point of view of responsibility and ethics, the search for partners is a break with previous practice. An ethical business model needs to be constructed.

Small artisan companies, especially those in the construction industry, tend not to train their employees as much as other sectors. Many authors consider this gap to be « natural », and related to the profile of their leaders or simply to their size. Yet the relationship between very small enterprises (VSE) and continuing education is much less homogeneous than it seems at first glance, and this is highlighted by the results of a study conducted by Constructys, a French body charged with collecting companies' obligatory contributions to the training budget. Based on interviews with top managers, four families of VSEs were identified around the following terms : reluctance, conviction, exploration and strategy, habit. Beyond a simple inventory, this consultation tends to accredit the hypothesis according to which the training patterns of the craft enterprises of the construction industry will evolve in the coming years.

The accompaniment of transitions is the poor relation of current discourses that turn essentially around the « skills » approach, supposed to be an additional modality of the empowerment of people in professional activity who are forced to adapt to an employment market undergoing ever-faster change. Even if this forced adaptation really exists, the skills approach does not deserve to be caricatured in such a way. When it is accepted that it can only be effectively implemented if the institutional actors are well coordinated, it can become a real lever for emancipation that must be accompanied as such, relying on an active policy of certification, of identification of transversal skills and of qualification of professional experience.

In France, employees have the legal right of to benefit, under certain conditions, from paid leave for vocational training. The law concerning vocational training which establishes this right has been modified with the addition of leave for a training project of transition. The trades unions forced a parliamentary debate around this change not only to guarantee the conditions of professional retraining, but also with a more strategic aim. Indeed, the desire of all the training stakeholders is for a real process of hybridization of the validation of professional experience with the pedagogical pathway in order to put the learner effectively at the center of their practices. Based on the example of leave for a training project of transition and its social, pedagogic and financial consequences, this article highlights the hidden face of the work done by trades unions – here the CFDT– in order to, with reference to the teachings of Bertrand Schwartz, « modernize without excluding ».

In the French system of vocational training, professional simulation periods (PSP) are open to all persons accompanied in their search for work. Although they are subject to detailed regulations, PSP's do not come with their own instructions for use. It is thus necessary to clarify the mobilization strategies that make this tool a generator of opportunities for categories of people considered to be difficult to employ, the instrument par excellence of « accompanied experience », backing up efforts to influence the recruitment strategies of companies. From this point of view, the « good use » of PSP's can significantly increase the valorisation capacities of labor market intermediaries.

The French association Transfer is engaged in the professional integration of people in difficulty regarding employment. Its integration strategies not only question the functioning of the labor market and its intermediaries but also open up the « black box » of companies and their organization. Distancing itself from the concept of employability and its concomitant judgmental norms, the approach specifies its target of intervention : the professional environment, the conditions necessary for entering it (recruitment practices) and remaining in it (integration practices). By putting the analysis of work and how it is performed back at the heart of the transactions, its approach constitutes a reminder of the situated nature of skills and a warning against the temptation to evaluate them ex nihilo.

An experiment targeting zero unemployed people in ten French territories is under way. It excludes the usual incantations for a return to growth, does not involve the use of threats supposed to stimulate a supposedly deficient level of motivation, or the obligation to get trained. There is no mention of the unemployed or job-seekers, but of persons deprived of employment, and the logic is that such persons can in no case, and whatever their qualification, be held responsible for their status. The Experimentation Territory Zero long-term Unemployed, based on an alternative approach to the return to work of those deprived of employment, is today seeking a wider deployment.

This article examines perceived trends for training in the future. More specifically, it analyses the tensions around two of these trends : multi-modality of training, and the skills block approach, with regard to learners, trainers, companies, and the environment. The author takes a step back in order to question training from the perspective of the right to education, and concludes by resituating the aims of training as belonging to the collective, private and individual domains.

In a context characterized by the increasing importance of language in the professional domain and the increased place of service activities, adults are more and more obliged to enter into verbal and non-verbal interactions with « users ». These demands are not without a certain impact on the field of training. This article sets out to categorize some of these changes and their effects on learning and training. The author defines the concept of « interactional competence » in order to identify the practical requirements that individuals face when they need to adjust their responses to the needs of others. Using some recent examples, he shows how these interactional skills can be developed in the context of training practices.

This article presents some elements of reflection on polysituated evaluation of the learning of individuals and collectives in socio-institutional and evaluative spaces. Two possibilities are discussed for a renewed problematization of evaluation. The first concerns the relation between signifier, what is signified and contexts of reference, in order to understand the activity of referentialization at the heart of evaluation. The second discusses the idea of a polycontextuality of evaluation. Some concrete examples are presented coming from a partnership with a training space for commercial staff in Switzerland.

Models under stress The sector of the provision of services for others has undergone radical changes, moving from the domestic sphere (a home craft industry) to that of professionalized jobs, under the leadership of the State (diplomas, skills and activity benchmarks…). To train people for these jobs, some major challenges must be faced together, and they involve risks and opportunities : a digital and connected world, an aging population, economic divisions making society more unequal. The services provided to others will have to take into account a silent fracture which can only be narrowed by privileging, starting from training for these jobs, a humanist approach which puts users at the center of the systems which are on offer to them.s

At a time when universities are organizing new courses to meet the special needs of students in initial and continuing education, this article examines the question of the training of researchers with a teaching role and its foreseeable medium-term evolutions. The legal obligation to train is seen as an opportunity to imagine training in tomorrow's university. This article presents an approach to the design of multiprofessional cooperative workshops, part of a pragmatic research program in the field of education and training. The goal is to turn these workshops into potential spaces for the development, emancipation and construction of a culture of action, in which learning is conceived as being the product of a joint activity.

The purpose of this article is to question how Kurt Lewin's theories, concepts and practices can be applied to change management and learning. In the framework of a partnership between an organization oriented towards more environmentally friendly farming practices and a university service, the author shows what conceptualization of practices and what propositions have come out of the cross-fertilization of fieldwork and Lewin's theories, as applied to training in today's and tomorrow's world.

This article sets out to examine the fundaments of a method of research in adult education that is based on a micrologic approach to experience. It is not a question of presenting a new method of research per se, nor of defining a new scientific concept, but of approaching the foundations of an epistemological, theoretical and methodological postulate, oriented towards the study of minuscule transformations and infinitesimal processes which are not frequently observed or not accorded sufficient importance and which, nevertheless, participate in the training of the individual.