High unemployment rates are weighing on the economic recovery of the Canary Islands. Currently 274,000 people are unemployed in the Islands and many of them are facing requalification as a condition for being able to reengage in the labor market.
An example of this is youth unemployment, which represents 7.85% of the total with 21,545 young people demanding a job. Of these, 93% only have primary or secondary studies, while 4.1% have professional training and 2.8% have university qualifications. To reverse these figures, the Archipelago has been entrusted to European funds that are committed to the ecological transition, the blue economy and the digital transformation. “We must have a change of mentality,” says the director of the Canary Islands Employment Service (SCE), Dunnia Rodríguez, pointing to a necessary economic diversification: “We are trying to put policies in the market that help us change the differential.”
Rodríguez attributes much of the youth unemployment that plagues the Islands to low enrollment in VET. While the rate in the CEOE is 29% and at the European level 25%, in Spain it barely reaches 12%. For this reason, from the next academic year dual Vocational Training will undergo its great revolution: there will be 123 groups in the Archipelago and 32 centers, which translates into a 42% increase in the number of places. The training offer will also grow by 25%, as well as the agreements with the companies.
The director of the SCE emphasizes that “as of this year there will no longer be a Professional Training for Education and a Professional Training for Employment, it will be integrated into the same law”. It also explains that dual VET is going to be divided into two lines to guarantee that its students occupy jobs: one in which the company will assume 20% of the learning without a contractual relationship and another advanced one in which the companies will assume 40% of learning with contractual relationship.
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