Dual VT: The advantages of learning by practicing

Combine teaching with in-company internships

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You learn while demonstrating your technical skills and cross-cutting competences in a real environment. What advantages does dual training offer? Who is it for?

Dual Vocational Training has emerged as a solution to two shortcomings that young people have when starting job: The lack of experience and the disparity between what is studied and what is put into practice in the workplace.

Dual Vocational Training, also known as Dual VT, combines classroom learning with in-company internships. In other words, it gives students the option of receiving training in an academic setting while being able to put into practice what they've learned in the workplace.

In this way, students in this modality don't just receive theoretical training, but they're polishing their knowledge, developing their technical skills, and getting experience in real situations such as those that they're going to experience when they finish their studies.

Dual VT as a response to the labor market

In addition to strengthening students' professional skills in parallel to their training, Dual VT also responds to a market demand.

According to data from the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, in 2025, 50% of jobs will require an average qualification, i.e. that of technicians and qualified Vocational Training technicians. Currently, in Spain only 25% of the working population has these studies.

“In the last few years, the Spanish labor market has evolved. More technical and very qualified jobs are in-demand in areas like administration and finance, mechatronics, or computer systems, than university graduates,” explains Piedad Curiel, Repsol Technology Lab researcher, who also acts as a metor for the dual professional training students who do their internships at our Company.

Specialties linked to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that are part of the 150 training cycles elegible for Dual VT:

Robotics

Electronic maintenance

Cybersecurity

Energy efficiency

Industrial chemistry

A future promoter for Dual VT

Teaching is adapted to what the market demands and the professional skills that companies require. This is a response to an essential condition in a more and more specialized, technical, and competitive job market.

In September 2021, the Organic Law on the Organization and Integration of Vocational Training Bill was passed, which ensures that all VT will be dual. This training modality will revolve around several cross-company themes: innovation, digitalization, applied research, and entrepreneurship.

Tomás Almarcha knows it well. He opted for Dual VT and did his internship at the low-density polyethylene plant as an operator. Now, he works at the Repsol industrial complex in Tarragona. “After finishing my university degree in Business Administration, I didn't find any job opportunities. Then I saw an offer as a plant operator, and I thought that it could be a career opportunity. I didn’t think twice about it, and I enrolled in the Industrial Chemicals Advanced Vocational Training Course. In college, you learn a lot of abstract things, but Dual VT dives into the specifics of each job role.”

According to all the expert, this training modality is going to be fundamental to respond to one of the big challenges of the Spanish economy: Having workers with high technical training capable of pursuing the new professions that the market is already demanding, in which new technologies are going to play an increasingly important role.