A Pole Emploi center in Bordeaux, France, on February 8, 2022 (AFP/Archives/Philippe LOPEZ)
Change to earn more, be better considered, flourish: the health crisis has had “an accelerating role” in the desire for professional retraining, according to recent studies and researchers interviewed by AFP.
“There is no change in salary, no change in position. At some point, the financial situation and the fact of maturing mean that this situation is no longer suitable”, testifies a temporary worker from National Education in an interview conducted by the BVA institute for a study just published by France Competences.
Authority for financing and regulating vocational training, France Competences believes that “the current crisis is playing an accelerating role in questioning the meaning and conditions of exercise of its activity”.
It is not yet the “great resignation”, named after these cascading departures in American companies at the end of the pandemic, but in France, according to an Elabe barometer for Unedic published in December, 58% of active job have at least one career change project.
According to the BVA survey, which combines quantitative data and qualitative interviews from a representative sample of 5,162 people, the “loss of meaning” is the reason most shared (27%) by workers in retraining, who evoke also “dissatisfaction” due to working conditions (23%), remuneration (22%), too much pressure (20%).
For Béatrice Delay, from the evaluation department at France Skills, “professional dissatisfaction is omnipresent in retraining courses and, at the same time, it is combined with reasons of another order: an opportunity, a , a personal reason”.
– Reversal of the balance of power –
At the origin of a retraining, “there is a triggering factor which can be missions that have become unbearable, as we have seen in the field of health”, notes Virginie Louise, from the employment-training center of BVA. During a consultation carried out in the spring of 2021 by their National Order, 40% of nurses confided that the health crisis had made them want to change their profession.
In its bulletin (number 418, February 2022), the Center for Research on Qualifications (Cereq) notes “different logics according to socio-professional category”.
Among the qualified blue-collar workers and employees dominates “the impression of not being paid enough considering the work carried out, the feeling that the employment occupied does not correspond to its qualifications”. Among the unskilled, “wanting to invest in a new profession is also forged in the refusal of precariousness, in the experience of jobs of limited duration”.
For the economist Mireille Bruyère, from the Center for Research and Work Organization Power Studies (Certop-CNRS), the pandemic “revealed something that was already there: a general labor crisis, which concerns the forms of employment and the meaning of work”.
“On the side of the least qualified jobs, we have working conditions and remuneration which have deteriorated, and on the other side, for the most integrated employees, we have types of management which have led to losses of meaning”, adds this member of the collective Les Economistes atterrés.
Sociologist specializing in the organization of work, Pascal Ughetto believes that “the health crisis amplifies a seesaw movement which was originally independent of it and which is accelerating with the reduction in unemployment: the reversal of the balance of power between employers and employees, the latter having much more opportunity to assert their claims”.
While the government welcomes an unemployment rate “at the lowest for almost 15 years” (7.4% in the 4th quarter of 2021), wage increases have been concluded in the hotel and catering industry or even road transport , two sectors with labor shortages.
“Converting to do something else is a risk-taking that would never have existed twenty or thirty years ago”, underlines Pascal Ughetto. Like many caregivers, “individuals are ready to give up statutory positions in favor of uncertain futures, so as not to feel trapped, to flourish, to control their destiny”.
© 2022 AFP
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