Avaliação da efetividade dos principais cursos FIC Pronatec do Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina : benchmarking com cursos técnicos de longa duração

The National Program for Access to Technical Education and Employment (Programa Nacional de Acesso ao Ensino Técnico e ao Emprego – Pronatec) was instituted by the Federal Government in 2011, having as objective extending the supply of professional and technological education courses. The program’s supply has been expressive in Santa Catarina’s Federal Institute (Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina – IFSC), as well as in the Federal Network of Professional and Technological Education (Rede Federal de Educação Profissional e Tecnológica) as a whole. Considering the short implementation time and the number of reached people, it is necessary to identify how this social program is being developed and if its objectives are being achieved. Thus, the general objective of this work is to evaluate the effectivity of IFSC’s main short courses by means of benchmarking against the long technical courses from Brazil South region. In particular, it was compared the quality between the short and long courses and the graduates situation with respect to employability and continuation of the studies. The data was obtained from questionnaire application and the employed methods were content analysis, Chi-square test and Mann-Whitney U test. The results showed that the percentage of employed graduates from either short and long courses were equal, but in the long courses the number of graduates that work in the field of graduation was statistically higher. Furthermore, the graduates from the long courses presented a higher mobility, moving in order to find work, occupying jobs in different Brazilian regions. With respect to studies continuation, the graduates from long courses presented a larger continuity and, while they sought higher education courses, most of the graduates from short courses sought other secondary technical courses. In general, the quality of the courses was perceived as between good and great by most of the different graduates analyzed.