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What are the key competences of professionals who are supposed to interact efficiently with the NEET? But, first: what is their professional profile? Moreover, in this regard – not to evade an even more radical question – can we really talk about professionals? Alternatively, is it preferable to settle cautiously for the less binding term of “operators”, strictly in the plural form? At the risk, however, of indirectly crediting an idea of professional “split into”, that is unfinished, behind which hides a number of “emergency” figures that are structured and are sized according to local understanding and for different social contexts, institutional and political?
In fact, these questions have arisen from the common work in the partnership. Of course, more or less directly, certainly, with emphasis and different accents depending on the cultures and sensitivities to the phenomenon of the CoMWork partner countries.
The reflection and research work have resulted in converging answers on methodology and relevance.
Methodologically wise, if we follow Schön (1983; 1987), the theoretical option of relevance of the “technical rationality” model was rejected regarding the paradigm of definitions of socio-educational operators in general versus to the ones particularly confronted to the NEETS issues.
In terms of relevance, a double goal was pursued: one in favour of a more reflective professional (in the words of Shon) and one of a “competence approach” based on the profile of the operator as well as the suggestions on training patterns (Goleman, Le Boterf, Boutinet, between others).
Beyond technical rationality: reflective rationality.
The “technical rationality” model pretends that professional activity consists in providing instrumental solutions to problems classified by theories and scientifically supported techniques.
Two main corollaries of this definition are:
- the coincidence of professionalism and specialization;
- the reduction of the prototypes of the professional expertise to a very limited number of professions, the so-called “learned professions”, such as medicine, law, business administration and engineering. According to Glazer (1974), one of the leaders of this school of thought, these professions can also be defined as “greater jobs”. They are distinguished from “minor professions” such as those of social work (by the way, they will fall in many operators of this project), teaching, priesthood and even city planning. But as noted by Schön (1983; 1987), who leads a critique and theoretical background to this address – you see in Glazer one of its greatest exponents – the so intended greater professions such understood are characterized by the fact of:
- having a clear aim (health, overcome the causes, profit, etc.).
- operating in stable institutional contexts;
- being based on fundamental systematic knowledge.
In contrast, the “minor professions” are affected by changing and ambiguous purposes, operating in contexts where professional activity is unstable; they do not develop a professional base of systematic or scientific knowledge. Hence, the definition of “minor professions” used as the equivalent of “no jobs”.
Schön underlines the shortcomings of the “technical rationality” model for the development of adapted professional epistemology in the political and cultural field of a society in profound transformation, as was the US in the nineteen eighties. Which today, as we see it, appears as a “Radical Modern” society (Giddens, 1990), that englobes the phenomenon of the NEET. Moreover, Schön underlines the importance of a “reflective rationality” that enables professionals to recognise themselves and re-think themselves as active and creative artificers of their own acts, of their own choices and decisions in the different contexts of their professional practice.
The training of a professional with this profile implies and supposes a deep revision of the training models. In ways to allow new teaching and learning paths for empirical knowledge sustained by “reflective rationality”, indispensable for the construction and the use of knowledge based on, and described by action. In this way, we give dignity and educational value to forms of non-systematized knowledge, which emerges empirically from the professional practice. This disrupts the traditional training model that assigned dignity in training only to forms of organized knowledge systematized, empirically transferable through technical procedures.
We think that this theoretical model offers a legitimate ground to reflective operators/professionals that are called to provide a multi-purpose function of training, education, accompaniment and guidance with a complex and fragile public, as are the NEETS. Providing this model is supported also by the ‘competence’ approach as elaborated in the Theoretical Framework.