Acquiring PTA (Personal Training Account) rights by part-time employees

· The announcement on Measure 3

Measure 3: All part-time employees, the majority of whom are women, will have increased rights

Deciphering

Three days before the Day of Women's Rights, Muriel Pénicaud held a press conference to announce her training 'big bang', including an unprecedented and targeted measure in the context of the updating of the Personal Training Account (PTA).

This announcement aroused surprise, not just because of its social conscience, but because it was not mentioned in the guidance document passed to the social partners on 15 November 2017. The National Interprofessional Agreement of 22 February 2018 did not refer to it either, in its section on the PTA.

Whether by chance or arising from the desire for consistency in recurring statistics, part-time staff will now have the same rights as full-time employees.

Do women have poorer access to training courses than men? Yes and no. Other criteria, such as the level of qualification and the size of the company, must be taken into account, without calling into question the legitimacy of a measure formally oriented towards the female majority of part-time workers.

Food for thought

The 2017 Yellow Paper gave us information on the rate of access to training courses by gender and by size of business:

in 2014, the rate of access to training courses for women was 40%, lower than that for men (46.5%). Although women in senior positions more often receive training than their male counterparts (58% as against 53%), they remain a minority in this category (36%). Female workers have significantly less access to training courses than men.

The chance of access according to sex still varies with the size of the business: with companies of more than 2,000 employees, the rate of access to training courses is 62.2% for men and 49.6% for women. In firms with 10 to 19 employees, the chances are much lower, but the trend is reversed: it is respectively 15.1% for men and 16.5% for women.

So far as working towards equality in access to training courses is concerned, other criteria also create discrepancies: the level of qualification, socio-professional category and size of company.

And we cannot consider the size of the company as a criterion without also referring to its sector of activity. In the future, it will be up to the skills operators, currently OPCA (Authorised Joint Collection Bodies), who will be organised into economic sectors.

The representation of women is not equally shared over all activity sectors. So will the priorities be planned to give better support to the publics identified as having less access to training? This was the case with the first version of the period of professionalisation which resulted from the 2004 Act targeting 'women after maternity leave' in particular, before that criterion of the publics concerned was removed by the 2014 Act.

Points to watch

The financermaformation site is an information site for all publics on the financing solutions covering training courses available in France. To this end, it responds to the many individual questions posed by a public in search of financing solutions for training courses.

The questions are mainly asked by women. Here are a few examples of the queries received* recently:

"as a stay-at-home mother of three, I have just been accepted to train as a Montessori teacher; I want to open a Montessori crèche in Montreuil. Is there an organisation which can pay for my training course, which will cost up to 9,000 euros? " Hana

"Hello, I am a pre-school assistant and want to take the ATSEM classroom assistant qualification" Sabrina

"Hello, I'm looking for work at the moment. I have passed the written tests for nursing training. Now I want to ask for funding to train as a nurse." Pauline

The principle of the acquisition of PTA rights which are the same for full-time employees as for part-time is therefore interesting to the extent that it targets a public which would not otherwise have realised that this approach aimed to benefit its rights.

This is the simplification of working to reverse statistics which we know have reflected inequalities for decades.

This measure announced by Muriel Pénicaud is already listed in the draft law which has been passed to the Council of State, confirming that part-time employees will have the same rights as full-time staff, from half-time upwards.

After the promised simplification of the acquisition of rights for part-time employees, the thorny question of simplifying the mobilisation of PTA rights remains.  An essential element to which this reform seems to lead us, with the monetisation of the PTA, is the potential decrease in financial support for training (cf. Training Reforms: deciphering, points to watch and trains of thought)

Assuming that she has a job, who will explain to Hana that the 9,000-euro training course that she wants to take could be subject to contributions from Hana herself, her employer, her employer's skills operator (etc)? **

Assuming that she is a job-seeker, who will explain to Hana that the 9,000-euro training course that she wants to take could be subject to contributions from Hana herself, the Regional Council, Pôle Emploi (etc)?

Look at what will be proposed in terms of simplification beyond the creation of a mobile PTA app.

 *These requests are real, and do not in any way correspond to what is sometimes seen on some e-commerce sites, including training sites, suggesting that half of France is connected at the same time with requests or bookings made every 30 seconds.

**Article 1 of the Draft Law on Training for the freedom to choose his own professional project

 Frank Savann, thematic expert for EPALE France

Translation (French - English) : EPALE France