The European Union faces high levels of youth unemployment, while thousands of vacancies remain unfilled in sectors such as health, logistics and technology. In this context, Spain has taken a bold step with Royal Decree 659/2023 by reformulating its training system and linking it directly to migration policy. This seeks to address the mismatch between labor supply and demand, as well as the aging population, through a flexible approach that recognizes skills acquired through work experience or informal learning and allows for qualification or re-qualification throughout life.

The new Law on Foreigners (which comes into force in May) also incorporates the figure of socio-training roots, thus allowing the regularization of the situation of immigrants through their training in areas aligned with the needs of the Spanish labor market. This measure -which already represents 11% of the regularizations in the country (CaixaBank Dualiza Observatory, 2024)- opens the door for Spanish training centers to partner with foreign institutions to train potential migrants “in origin”, through double degree programs and international validation. This is how a person can study computer engineering in Peru and obtain a Spanish work visa upon graduation.

The global working age population today is equally distributed between low and high income countries, but in the next two decades Latin America and Africa will have 50% more people of working age than high income countries (WEF, 2024). On the other hand, in the Chile of 2050 there will be three times more people over 60 years of age than under 14 (INE), which makes it urgent to modernize the training system by generating conditions that are truly in tune with the changing demands of the labor market and facilitate that people can change their labor trajectories as many times as necessary, prior recognition of previous skills and studies, in addition to promoting shorter, relevant and better articulated careers.

While thousands of young Chileans opt to study and work in Spain (INE Spain, 2025), entrepreneurs like Rodrigo Poblete have also visualized the opportunity that this decree brings by adapting their educational offer to the requirements of the European system. For him, standards such as labor micro-credentials will be a fundamental tool to validate specific skills and promote lifelong learning.

The Spanish model offers a possible example for Chile, providing flexibility, relevance and a change of perspective on migration, which now becomes a strategic lever for planned economic development and assumes that talent is now a global, mobile and critical resource, so that countries must generate enabling conditions to avoid losing it.

Opinion column by Mónica Retamal for El Mercurio