Paper: Mexico’s efforts to educate and train energy industry workers are insufficient

The Mexican government’s so-called Strategic Human Resources Training Program for the Energy Industry is not structured enough to be considered a program, let alone offer a strategic focus for such a plan’s implementation, according to a paper from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Credit: shutterstock.com/Rice University

The program was instituted in February 2014 on the heels of Mexico’s 2013 energy reform, which raised expectations of increased and better job opportunities. Mexico’s secretariat of energy announced that 135,000 jobs would be available in the industry by 2018.

“Let There Be Light in Mexico! Analysis of the Strategic Human Resources Training Program for the Energy Industry” offers a critical analysis of the Mexican government’s efforts to build public policy for human capital, assesses the viability of the program and provides recommendations for improvement. The paper was authored by Miriam Grunstein, nonresident scholar at the Baker Institute’s Mexico Center, professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Mexico and chief energy counsel at Brilliant Energy Consulting.

“The idea of this study is not to belittle the intentions or the efforts of the federal government in issuing its Strategic Human Resources Training Program for the Energy Industry, although we do consider it to be immature, and therefore unviable, according to the terms in which it has been proposed,” Grunstein wrote. “We insist that the formation of a real strategy of this kind will be concomitant, rather than a precursor, to the rebirth of this industry in Mexico. With a snap of their fingers, (President) Enrique Peña Nieto’s government rushed to build an industry in the sky, which will supposedly require 135,000 new bodies. There is a lot more to be done before Mexico can see the light.”

What the federal government truly needed to develop a successful program was time, Grunstein said. “Everything was done immediately under the president’s order of ‘let there be light,” she wrote. “With the haste of this mandate, there wasn’t enough time to analyze the current state of human capital or develop a new vision that not only renewed the industry’s regulations but also its human resources. Presidential volition and political negotiation may influence the legal field, but it cannot guide human motivations or outcomes. With all of its imperfections, the market would do better to generate and retain a professional vocation than to follow all of the exhortations of the president and his government.”

Grunstein provides general suggestions that could be useful for the government to improve the program’s deficiencies, including prioritizing attention on education; providing leadership for teachers and students to succeed; better strategic management of human capital in regard to the job market; advancing the idea that education and work are systems of rewards and consequences; and building an explicit, transparent and accountable evaluation system.