On a false wall, inside a municipal trade school, nine students prepare cement, arrange bricks and receive instructions as if they were on a real construction site; It is not just any practice and more than half of the workers, plumbers and electricians who pass through those classrooms find employment.
The place is in Usera, Madrid, and it has been working for a year with the idea of train unemployed people in jobs that companies need to fill, but where they do not always find qualified labor.
There’s not too much theory floating around at the beginning. There are tools, pipes, cables, materials, experienced teachers and students who come without work, others with language difficulties and others wanting to enter a stable job for the first time.
The Municipal School of Green Employment and Trades trained 315 students during its first year of activity. The data that the municipality looks at the most is not only in the number of registered, but in what happened afterwards since 55.45% of the graduates found work.
The figure is important because it does not speak of individual courses or certificates that end up saved in a folder. In many cases, The training ended in contracts linked to the same sectors that are taught within the school.
The courses target trades such as masonry, electricity, green plumbing, air conditioning and tasks linked to the construction and rehabilitation of buildings, for all of which there is a specific demand which facilitates employability.
In the workshops, students do not sit back and watch an explanation from the bench. They build walls, recognize tools, learn names of materials, repeat tasks and correct mistakes with a teacher at their side.
This training matters, especially for those who come from fragile work trajectories. Some students are immigrants and also need to learn local technical vocabulary.
Why the trades became a concrete job option again
For years, talking about jobs seemed to look backwards. Today the opposite happens. The lack of workers specialized in construction, electricity, plumbing and air conditioning caused these profiles to be sought again.
The rehabilitation of buildings, new facilities, energy efficiency and urban reforms drive this demand. It is not enough to have the desire to work; It is necessary to know how to do a task well, comply with rules and move safely within a construction site.
This is where the value of a municipal trade school comes in. It does not work as a general training, but as a response to real vacancies that companies say they cannot fill.
For an unemployed person, change can be rapid. In less than a year you can go from not having a clear job opportunity to managing tools, understanding a work process and presenting yourself to a company with specific training.
In this way, the trade stops appearing as a last resort and once again occupies a stronger place, thanks to training in technical work that results in sustained demand and the possibility of a stable contract.
