Brazil firm tries bridging education gap

Fabiana Nunes Rodrigues didn’t know much about trains. But she wanted a good job, she said, something stable, maybe as a mechanic, like her grandfather. Brazilian college courses didn’t offer much in the way of technical instruction. But one company in her home town did, and she already knew it well.

From the age of 15, Rodrigues had spent her afternoons in technical classes sponsored by the mining giant Vale, the world’s largest producer of iron ore. So it made sense that when she graduated from high school she would enroll in Vale’s nine-month train maintenance course on this vast corporate campus on a rise above the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’ve always wanted to work for Vale,” said Rodrigues, now 18, standing in a maintenance facility where cranes were lifting hulking metal tubing from a train engine. “Now many of my friends want to take this class, too.”

Vale also wants people like Rodrigues, and is willing to do a lot to get them. With more than 150,000 employees worldwide, it is one of several large corporations in fields such as mining, aerospace and construction that are driving Brazil’s ascent in the world economy. But the firms’ ambitious plans for growth have bumped into a problem hampering development across Latin America: a higher education system that does not churn out enough engineers and others with technical skills, even as the global economic crisis depresses the demand.

Despite being one of the world’s most populous countries, Brazil does not have a single university ranked in the top 100 internationally. Of its college graduates, just 5% are engineers, far below the rates of countries such as China and South Korea, according to Brazilian businesses.

Since Brazil’s education system is falling short, Vale, like several other Brazilian companies here, has decided to build its own.

“For years, technical education was not the main focus of the government,” said Marco Dalpozzo, Vale’s global human resources director. “Mining was not seen for the last 20 years as a great opportunity or a vocational business opportunity for the country. So you have professions for which Vale had to create their own entire system of education.”

Over the last few years, several Latin American countries have enjoyed soaring growth rates as they exported oil, minerals and agricultural products around the world. In Brazil, gross domestic product more than doubled, to $1.3 trillion, in the five years ending in 2007, while inflation dropped to 3.6% , a quarter of the 2003 level.

Yet recent studies have shown that workers in Latin America have less education than those in East Asia and Eastern Europe and that the percentage of students enrolled in high school is much lower than in developed countries. In Colombia, one out of every 700,000 people receive PhDs, compared with one in 5,000 in developed countries, wrote Jeffrey Puryear and Tamara Ortega Goodspeed in a contribution to a book published this year titled “Can Latin America Compete?”

“The region’s limited number of scientists and advanced degree recipients weakens the region’s competitiveness by limiting countries’ ability to use and generate knowledge, and to carry out research,” they wrote.

For younger students, Latin American countries have focused in recent years on building schools and expanding access to public education, rather than improving the quality of that education, said Emiliana Vegas, a senior education economist at the World Bank. Teachers’ pay raises are based on longevity rather than performance, and few parents are used to demanding more-rigorous standards.

“Most Latin American parents have less education than their kids. They feel their kids are already receiving an advantage they didn’t get,” said Vegas, who co-authored the book “Raising Student Learning in Latin America.” In the most recent results of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s triennial tests of 15-year-olds from 57 countries, the Latin American countries that participated, including Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, consistently scored near the bottom. “It’s not just that kids need to go to school, they need to learn in school,” Vegas said.

Poor education leads to a lack of skilled workers. A survey of more than 1,700 industrial firms by Brazil’s National Confederation of Industry last year found that more than half could not find enough trained workers. The biggest companies in Brazil, as well as elsewhere in Latin America, have taken it upon themselves to change this dynamic.

For the last several years, airplane manufacturer Embraer has partnered with Brazilian universities to train thousands of engineers, and in June the company opened an educational headquarters at its Eugenio de Melo plant in Sao Paulo state.

The declining global demand for minerals amid the financial crisis has recently slowed Vale’s rapid growth. The company said last week that it would cut 1,300 jobs and that about 5,000 workers would take enforced holidays in coming months to slow production. But the company said it is still investing heavily in its future employees.

Over the next five years, Vale estimates it will need 62,000 new workers. This year, about 7,000 students are taking courses in its schools and training programs, from graduate studies for engineers and geologists to technical courses for high school graduates. The company has opened three schools and is building a fourth to educate potential employees. It pays students salaries and health benefits, provides food and dental care, and sometimes offers bus passes and hotel rooms to students who don’t live close to their classes, all part of the fierce competition for skilled local labor.

“The biggest companies woke up in the past years, and they all need these kind of professionals,” Dalpozzo said. “So the companies that want to have a sustainable future need to invest in that.”