The Deputy Minister of Vocational Training, Jorge Arevalo, took part in the European Summit on “The Role of Regions and Cities in Delivering High Quality Apprenticeships” on 3 June. The conference is organized by the European Commission and the European Committee of the Regions (CDR) in collaboration with the EARLALL (European Association of Regional and Local Authorities for Lifelong Learning) network.

The European Commission invited the Basque Vocational Training Conference to give its opening speech, and Deputy Minister Jorge Arevalo explained how Europe must deal with the future of Vocational Training from the current perspective of Basque Vocational Training. The telematic conference was held on June 3 and 4 and was attended by high authorities. The opening session was attended by Nicolas Schmit, European Commissioner for Employment and Social Rights, and Apostolos Tzitzikostas, President of the European Committee of the Regions.

Focus on people

Deputy Minister of Vocational Training Jorge Arevalo, in his speech, spoke about the profound changes taking place in our society, especially due to the rapid speed of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and described the scenario before us, which will be characterized by robotics, artificial intelligence and 5G and 6G connectivity. “Everything in this world will be connected, 5.0 will be a new society,” he stated.

Therefore, Europe needs to make major changes, which, in Arevalo's words, "force us to transform the European production structure, reorganize employment and change our training systems".

The Deputy Minister of Vocational Training stressed that man must be the first goal of this 5.0 society, and that the axis of any change must be the person. “The easiest thing is to buy machines; the hardest part is getting them to work and not stop. Automation and robotics can take the place of basic labor, but all things will need specialized and well-trained people to work well, ”he said.

"To do this, he explained, the challenge of Vocational Training is to expand and expand the activities to different areas in order to respond to the complex future we face." Vocational Training must therefore respond to new challenges: it must develop new learning methods; it must establish new organizational systems; and Vocational Training schools need to become VT 5.0 smart schools. "They need to be schools that work on high-performance training, strategic innovation and applied intelligence, radically changing the training of people and helping our companies on the path to smart development."

Collaborative networks and centers of excellence

In 2018, the European Commission took them as a reference for the launch of the initiative of European Centers of Excellence in the Basque Country for Vocational Training and Technology (Center for Applied Research in Basque Vocational Training). Modeled by these European centers of excellence, which are being promoted by the European Commission - and leading 12 cooperation platforms in different sectors - Arevalo reaffirmed the need to continue with this formula, that is, by working online. “Collaborative networks are strategic to meet these future challenges; they are of paramount importance in establishing a successful future ”.

In this regard, he assured with certainty that the excellent results of this strategy will be seen in a few years, and will place Europe at the forefront of Vocational Training in the world.
To end the talk, although he acknowledged that there is still a lot of work to be done, he noted that we are on the right track. “But keep in mind that the future must be prepared now. We have to come up with a different way of doing things, thinking about what we need tomorrow and starting to design today ”.

Round table

Basque Vocational Training continued to take part in the conference on 4 June, with the participation of Rikardo Lamadrid, Director of Technology and Advanced Learning at the Department of Education, and Iñigo Araiztegui, Head of Internationalization at Tknika (Basque Center for Applied Vocational Research).

Both took part in a telematic roundtable on the involvement of local and regional actors in the future challenges of European training, together with representatives from Brittany (France), Västra Götaland (Sweden) and the City of Rome (Italy).