The Skills of Multi-Skilling. Discussion Paper No. 100.

In Brazil, electronic technicians are increasingly being asked to perform a number of technical and nontechnical tasks, for which they need complex education and training or multiskilling. The typical tasks faced by electronic technicians require a relatively high level of abstraction and symbolic learning. Required skills cover a broad range of intellectual and technical abilities. Electronics is expected to keep changing, and technicians should be able to keep up with these developments and to learn how to learn. Employers value technicians with general abilities and knowledge subsumed under the general term of trainability. They are also concerned with two major categories of theoretical knowledge: the basic principles behind the functioning of electronic systems and equipment and the specific disciplines that impart knowledge, information, and technical skills in electronics, automation, pneumatics, and mechanics. Both employers and students expect electronics to be a lifelong experience. An analysis of 30 years of curriculum change in the electronics school of Santa Rita do Sapucai shows that pure theory in the 1960s became applied in the 1970s. The critical challenge of multiskilling is to overcome the tension between the employer's demand for increasingly highly qualified technicians and the immediate realities of the workplace where repetitive jobs predominate and limit the extent to which higher skills can be used and developed. (YLB)