Contenu du sommaire : L'AFEST : cadrages et débordements

The founder of a personal service company tells how, feeling dispossessed of his own project by people who decide for others, he chose AFEST to professionalize his employees : « If we want to make progress skills development and vocational training, we need to ask ourselves who the “client” is, and how we help them. AFEST is disruptive because it starts from there : the needs of the company and that of the employee. »

The redefinition of continuing vocational training, understood as a pathway and able to draw its pedagogical material from the work activity, leads to a profound questioning of the ways of intervening. This article does not propose a new model for AFEST trainers to follow, but rather characteristics of action likely to « refresh » the paradigm that frames their approach. It identifies three intentions favorable to the development and support of on-the-job training. These intentions find their potential in a particular quality of attention, and the article then characterizes it in three points, mobilizing concepts of the philosopher François Jullien : decoincidence, the potential of situations and connivance.

Since Law n° 2018-771 concerning the « freedom to choose one's professional future », it is possible to carry out the training action, as defined by the legislator, in a work situation. Consideration of the legal regime of work situation-based training (AFEST) alone profoundly modifies the image of training law and the understanding of the rules that organize it around the notion of competence. However, the legal and practical scope of the provisions relating to AFEST remains largely unknown. In reality, these provisions only determine the formal conditions for the development of training ; they are not an instruction manual. The effectiveness and efficiency of AFESTs in terms of skills development depends on the resources and methods used to organize the training in situ.

This article analyses the difficulties raised by skills operators' advisors in charge of the development of training actions in the workplace in the context of working meetings related to a commitment to job and skills development and led by a regional association for the improvement of working conditions. It identifies the strategies at work to develop these actions and analyses the difficulties encountered by advisers in getting their contacts in the branches or SMEs to the development of training actions in the workplace. The paper questions how the change ofscale that allows to move from an experiment to its generalization can be viewed.

AFEST questions the action of public and semi-public funders, who must not only integrate this new modality into their management processes, but also promote it to respond to the will expressed by the legislator. They are thus invited to reinvent themselves, by playing the role of influencer for the action of companies and individuals in accordance with the framework defined by public action. We can imagine that, shortly, the funder will have only a small place within AFEST, when the companies will have appropriated the mechanisms and will have identified the benefits, to the point that it will no longer be necessary to provide a financial incentive to encourage them to initiate such actions.

The article describes how the Automotive services branch, which has always invested in training, seeks to implement the AFEST in the specific institutional context of its own following the reform of vocational training in 2018. The National Association for Automotive Training (ANFA), which has been in existence for a long time, builds training schemes, while the Skill Operator Mobilités, stemming from the reform, ensures their financing and deployment to companies. In describing the origin and development of an experiment conducted by ANFA in collaboration with Mobilités, it shows how the branch plays institutional questions, various conceptions of professionnal training, financial or even commercial issues to implement AFEST in the reality of each of its companies, developing the skills of its employees by promoting a learning work environment.

The link between work and training is not straightforward. Will work based training succeed in reconciling what obviously should be inseparable ? The article attempts to clarify what brings together and disunites these two objects, concepts and modes of acting, from texts and testimonies in the field of continuing vocational training. The author examines the paradoxical nature of the challenge launched by the legislator, via AFEST, to those involved in work and training, as well as the hypotheses on which it would be possible to consolidate the links found between work and training.

The demand for a training as triage nurse in an Emergency ward has led to the implementation of an intervention, mixing analysis of work and work-based training. This article set out how the trainingprogramm was able to set up cross dialogical spaces on work and its organization. The training work queries the place of knowledge whithin the reflective dynamics, but also questions the conditions for the reorganization of relations between management, healthcare professionnals and work activity.

The experience accumulated in an aeronautical assembly company shows the necessity and the gains of a work upstream to the elaboration of a training program : the analysis of the demand, that of the state-of-the-art and that of the activity make it possible to work out a didactic and pedagogical engineering as well as an organizational and political engineering which will ensure the perenniality and the profitability of the training program. The article details how the coupling between nonproductive (simulated) and productive (tutored) on-the-job training elaborates learning modalities favourable to a sustainable global performance which includes aspects related to the development of employee' skills as well as to quality, deadlines, health and safety.

This contribution analyses an AFEST experiment within a small familly business. Through the capabilities approach, authors question how this modality and its particular engineering could promote actors' capabilities to act (to learn, to train, to support). Finally, there is the question of the formalism level and the adequate AFEST engineering requirement, in view of small familly business realities and possibilities, to make this learning method a way of making organizations more capacitating.

Workplace training actions are part of a global context of re-internalization of training functions within the production system, which requires investment in the emergence of learning work organizations. They also raise the needfor a virtuous balance between the contributions of training organizations and the training functions of companies. Finally, they are intended to compensate for the shortcomings of our vocational training system with regard to the less qualified. For all these reasons, the implementation of AFEST requires a methodological and didactic reinvestment in training engineering, and a commitment from the work groups and their representatives.

The article questions the links between AFEST and important determinants of working conditions. The first part recalls the findings drawn up at the end of the national experiment which made it possible to define the outlines of this new training method, ie the occurrence of unexpected effects on working conditions. The second part takes the point of view that it is in fact the intrinsic qualities of AFEST that convey this dimension of improving working conditions.

The author describes some of the difficulties encountered during the last two years of experimentation, insisting on the limitations both methodological and theoretical regarding the use of the notion of competence. This will lead her to investigate another concept : the work situation. How to define and limit a work situation so that it becomes an operating concept ? Because ultimately, the interest of AFEST lies in its ability to take work into consideration: not work in general but this work in this context with these actors. Hence the importance of moving from the concept of competence to the competence in a work situation.

The creation support programs give a privileged place to situational learning, especially when the creator starts an activity, even a modest one. Certain support methods, focused on mastering management situations, are similar to the practices developed within the framework of work situation-based training actions. A survey of support networks shows that this situational learning could actually take place throughout the course, based on real, emerging or constructed management situations. The AFEST reference makes it possible to imagine a global and strategic framework of support from and through the experience of creators, likely to reinforce its effectiveness in terms of developing entrepreneurial skills.

Regularly, some actors are surprised that training expenses are not recognized as capital expenditure and, therefore, cannot be recorded on the company's balance sheet and then depreciated. The article shows that accounting standard-setters have good reason not to over-open up to the activation of training expenses without wishing to deny them their investment character. As a result, it proposes to take another path to activate the training investment. This path presupposes a rethink of training situations in order to be able to think these situations as also management situations.

Training action in work situation heralds the freedom to give new forms to training. The learner is approached as a socially built professional, not as an executor to be informed. A collective of actors is organized around him, with distributed, dynamic and interdependent functions to build his path, to support him and measure his skills upstream and downstream of the training. Transmissive and applicative pedagogies give way to integrative and situated practices. This educational purpose starts from and returns to an already existing situation (déjà-là in French) : pre-existing to the training situation and renewed by it. A cooperative collective is structured to support a professional who seeks to develop himself by developing his profession.