Spain's SEPE rejects job training applicants based on priority criteria

Valencia: 15 job training courses, 15 rejections: who gets priority?

Is being unemployed enough to get into a job training course? No. In Valencia, an unemployed person applied to 15 courses and, according to their account, was rejected from all fifteen. The barrier wasn't entry requirements, but a priority scoring system that reserves spots for women and about twelve groups considered vulnerable. The call details this without ambiguity: the beneficiary entity selects the students.

The twelve categories that decide who gets in

The document distributes priority among twelve cases, from letter a to l. Leading the list are victims of gender-based violence. Next come people with disabilities, those with low qualification levels, people over 45, and the long-term unemployed. Further down appear workers with part-time or temporary contracts, employees of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), those affected by collective dismissal procedures (ERE), and recipients of the Valencian inclusion income or the minimum vital income. Closing the table are single-parent families, transgender people, Roma people, migrants, and members of minority ethnic groups.

Being female functions as a transversal priority: it doesn't require proving any other circumstance. For men, as interpreted in the thread, getting in requires fitting into at least one of the listed cases. The reading of this asymmetry is that the gender criterion weighs more than any objective situation of need. The call itself adds that priority will also be given to those who converted contracts to permanent under the 2012 labor reform.

Majority of women in a machining workshop

Surprise came when checking the actual student profile. In the Chip Removal Machining course, most registrants were women, according to the account of the forum user who started the thread, a result several found striking for a classic industrial trade. The coincidence between the scoring system and classroom composition fuels suspicion that priority not only guides selection but ends up determining it completely.

Are these courses useful?

Here the diagnosis is uncomfortable: many who have taken them say no. The most repeated criticism is that content is basic, that teachers sometimes don't master the trade, and that the real goal ends up being keeping busy rather than training. A specific experience illustrates this: someone recounting their time in regulated vocational training says their workshop went 50 days without a main teacher until a substitute arrived to teach welding despite never having welded before. The repeated conclusion is that the certificate opens no doors.

The second accusation points to money. It is claimed that private entities teaching the courses receive training funds, partly from the European Union, and that their interest is for students not to drop out so they don't lose payment. Under that prism, the ideal profile wouldn't be one who finds work quickly, but one who lasts until the end. It's a hypothesis difficult to verify, but explains why the system rewards permanence.

The alternative route

Against public employment service courses, some recommend workshop schools and municipal programs, where you get paid and contribute to social security during training. Examples cited include forestry, gardening, or nursing assistant roles. Others consider regulated vocational training directly, though the path itself leaves doubts: those who have completed it describe a low level and a workshop dependent on an absent teacher.

There are also those who disagree that this is new. They argue these criteria have been applied for fifteen years in INEM, CCOO, and workshop school courses, and that the problem isn't current but stems from how employment training has been designed. For the job seeker, the effect is the same: the obstacle course starts before sitting in the classroom.

The logic of prioritizing groups

Behind the scoring system is a widespread way of distributing public resources: instead of assigning aid based on individual need, the population is divided into groups and those supposedly concentrating more deficiencies are prioritized. The result, according to critics, is statistics that improve on paper but may exclude those who don't fit any category. A middle-aged man, without family burdens and with average qualifications, wouldn't enter, they claim, almost any active employment policy, even if unemployed like everyone else.

Who decides and on what criteria?

The most uncomfortable point is accreditation. The text reserves priority for women and listed groups, but doesn't detail how membership in some of them is proven. The lingering question is how one certifies, for example, belonging to a minority ethnic group or being transgender. Without clear criteria, critics suggest, the line between positive action and arbitrariness blurs, and rejection stops seeming like an error and becomes the literal application of the rule.

For those criticizing the system, with these published scoring rules, no one needs to manually discriminate anymore.