SENA TecnoParque

Today Sandra invited me for a visit she had organized for two visitors from US colleges (from Boston and Philidelphia) to one of their vocational training centers. They call these centers "TecnoParque" which freely translated means "Technology Centers". The center we visited is located in an old factory hall in a low income area in the south of the city. The photo below is taken on the outside and on the hill behind the center you can maybe see informal housing of which most have no proper sanitation or water supplies. SENA advertises via the internet and newspapers the option to compete for free training for different age groups: adult learners (re-training), high school graduates and also the age group before high school. I will explain below how that works with some photos.

SENA uses a lot of "mobile classrrooms" for areas where SENA can not (yet) build training facilities. You see some of these "labs on wheels" in the parking lot. They also have a few boats with labs and classrooms for the large river deltas where there are no roads.

You can see in this photo the structure of the former factory building. The entire place is an "open concept": one learning areas flows into another one. Hard to get on a photo, but I felt it is a very nice and inspiring concept rather than the "compartamentalized training units" we have in Europe and North America. Below is a group of young adults working on an IT project:

And behind them is a group of high school students (in school uniforms) working on a project:

Further in the hall I observed a couple of groups of adult learners. One group was training on simulators donated by Caterpillar. Another group was just starting in another integrated learning environment. And yet others were training on aircraft maintenance (see the small plane in the back of the last photo).

 

In smaller labs training is given in micro-electronics (see photo below of an instructor explaining the production of "boards"), "life sciences" (water treatment, food technology, etc) and electricity. They also have machines for the new technology of "3D printing" (to see how good the student's technical drawings work out) and CAD/CAM (see photos below).

The last photo is a theoretical class in their culinary training area. SENA training is all free and their target group is the lower income families. For the pre-high school age group it is to be compared with some of the North American "Mad Scientist" program to stimulate youngsters into technical careers. They get about 20,000 applications each year for that young category and select only 2,000 after quite an elaborate two week screening process. From these students 100 % move on in technician and technologists programs after high school (SENA also offers the Quebec GECEP system of the last two years of technical high school). Almost all of them find employment (in the bigger cities) or create their own small businesses (in smaller towns and rural areas). There are no statistics on this, but a good numbber of these students later in their career do university degrees. Something they could never have dreamt of when they grew up on that hill in very poor housing and many of them in broken families and too many criminal activities around them. The program with the young ones is only three years in operation as a formal national program, but it is already a huge success.

This visit was a wonderful showing of the incredible work SENA does around the country....