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MANAGING EDUCATION OF ADULTS AND THE UNEMPLOYED IN VOCATIONAL COLLEGES
B. Tursunov Y. Zhamolova
Uzbekistan has more than 1,500 vocational colleges, many of which boast state-of-the-art equipment. In addition to core activities, their charters provide for these colleges to offer educational services to adults as one of the forms of continuing education. Adult education has its own features that differ it from school and vocational education. Therefore, adult education workers should have certain skills enabling them to work with adults.
Vocational training of the unemployed is one of the main areas of a proactive employment policy. It is aimed at matching supply to demand for professions and qualifications that are required by the labor market. Usually this concerns additional vocational education. There are three possible options: (1) vocational training, i.e. in fact initial training; (2) retraining in another profession or occupation; and (3) upgrading one’s skills in one’s current profession, occupation or business. Special educational programs are developed for unemployed people, taking into account their level of education, age, gender and social status. Training should provide them with new knowledge and skills, and give them an opportunity to successfully develop a new profession in line with their individual needs and capabilities. One of the major tasks to be done by specialists who work with the unemployed is to create a friendly atmosphere of success to facilitate the activation of internal resources and help learners to restore their confidence in themselves and their capabilities. Those who teach adults should act, to some extent, as a psychotherapist, making the learning setting psychologically optimistic.
When organizing the learning process, you should remember that the unemployed are individuals of different ages, and differ in terms of their level of education, professional training, physical and psychological status. Thus their life experiences vary. Therefore we can identify a few groups which should be offered different courses, forms and methods of training. The first group includes people aged 16 to 25 who have good theoretical knowledge, vocational or higher education, but no work experience (these are school graduates who failed to enter educational institutions to continue their studies, or graduates from colleges and universities). The second group are unemployed people aged 25 and older who have certain professional skills and either are sent for training by their employers or employment and social security centers or join training programs by themselves. The third group includes people seeking to start their own business (small and medium-sized entrepreneurs and farmers) and those preparing themselves for being self-employed. The fourth group is people with health problems who cannot find job in the open labor market and people with restricted work capacity. When making up these groups, you should pay attention to the candidates’ previous education and professional experience. It should be taken into account that people older than 45 to 50 years of age sometimes experience difficulties with acquiring knowledge and skills in some professions. People with restricted work capacity not
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only require special attention, but also an individual approach in training. Instructors will have to allocate some of the training time for working with such students, and this may affect the training results for the other students. Therefore it is advisable that the number of such students in a group not exceed one or two. If possible, it would be better to offer them an individual training course. Work to make up training groups should adjust curricular and training programs to meet students’ wishes and take into account their level of theoretical knowledge and experience applying practical skills, as well as requirements of employers, by carrying out a preliminary questionnaire survey and tests among the students to find out their current level of professional training. It should be taken into account that when trained in the form of traditional lectures involving a one-way transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the students with the latter acting as passive listeners, the unemployed learn 20 to 30 percent of the learning content on average. Therefore it is necessary to use different methods and forms of training, such as discussion lectures, business games, roundtables, brainstorming, discussions in groups, seminars, laboratory work and hands-on methods. The use of various active forms and methods of training not only increases interest in knowledge and aspirations to enhance it, but also requires that students exhibit a high level of professionalism. It should always be kept in mind that regardless of age, education, professional and life experience of the unemployed, the main feature of adult education is that sessions must be built on the principles of democratic communication.
When teaching unemployed adults, focus should be placed on their acquiring professional skills in the first place. Therefore, training should be provided using the most intensive program, with a lot of self-guided work. Due to differences in age, education level, life and practical experience, and depending on the area, forms and methods of training, both traditional and non-traditional forms and methods of examination should be used.
The goal and result of professional training of the unemployed is not so much to ensure that they gain new knowledge and skills as to build in them a motivation to learn a new profession and to identify their ability to determine and successfully go on their own way of developing a new profession in line with their individual needs and capabilities. Thus, a major function of professional retraining of the unemployed is to create optimal conditions for the development of their personal ability to socialize and actively adapt to a new socio-economic environment and social interactions.
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