The individual right to training: a modest record

By Renaud Descamps - Training and Employment, n° 101. With an access rate of just 6.5% in 2010, the individual right to training (IRT) has not achieved the success expected of it. Moreover, the average number of hours’ training undertaken has stagnated at around 20. A lack of information and support for employees may explain this limited success. After all, the mere existence of an individual right is not in itself sufficient to enable workers to avail themselves of it; the context, which determines whether or not circumstances are propitious, is decisive. Télécharger la publication.
A major innovation introduced in the 2003-2004 reform of vocational training, the individual right to training, or IRT, has now been in place for more than eight years. Today, with hindsight, we can look beyond the initial conjectures and hypotheses, which at the time combined hopes of access to training for all with anxieties about funding. However, the record is somewhat disappointing. The IRT was intended to help employees play a part in shaping their own career trajectories. However, it has not been used sufficiently to fulfil this ambition. The ability to construct a career that includes training still seems to be heavily dependent on conditions in the employing firm, and in particular on its HRM policy.
What obstacles remain?
If the IRT can be seen as a way of equipping individuals to face the labour market, the scheme raises a number of questions.
Firstly, the IRT is subject to the employer’s agreement. Consequently, its introduction is not likely to lead to any significant changes in the hierarchical relationships that exist to varying degrees depending on the firm and employee category in question. The fact that an employee whose request is refused twice is given priority access to individual training leave (ITL) has not proved to be a credible threat likely to initiate employer/employee dialogue where there is a lack of goodwill. This has led some commentators (Thierry Le Paon, of the CGT trade union federation, in the Quotidien de la formation) to observe that the IRT is not an opposable right.
Secondly, firms are social constructs whose management styles accord varying degrees of importance to employee information, negotiation and career development interviews. These are all factors that foster employees’ ability to discuss their training and make it easier for a scheme such as the IRT to become established. Under certain circumstances, it may become more than a formal right. In other cases, its existence does not fundamentally alter industrial relations. In such situations, a lack of interest on the part of both employees and employer leads to training being neglected.
It is nonetheless the case that the IRT, in terms of its theoretical and legal foundations, is an interesting tool. In the firms that make use of it, it seems to be a factor in reducing inequalities of access to training. Ultimately, its main failing is undoubtedly that it has not become sufficiently well established in those firms in which it is most required, i.e. those that provide the least training. It would appear that the reasons for not providing training are the same as those preventing the adoption of the IRT. In this regard, the preamble to the 2003 agreement gives employee representative bodies and a company’s supervisory and managerial staff a fundamental role in ensuring the development of vocational training. To this end, employees are supposed to receive information about training measures and to be supported in developing and implementing their career plans. These intentions have only rarely been followed by effects. Consequently, companies today should put in place policies enabling their employees to negotiate on the development of their skills. Télécharger la publication.