Continuing education and bidirectional engagement with the public-productive sector: Building an integrated ecosystem for lifelong learning

Abstract

University continuing education in Chile operates under a twofold fragmentation. On the one hand, quality assurance criteria treat teaching and university-society engagement as separate institutional domains, which translate into parallel structures, processes, and metrics that rarely interact. On the other hand, there is no systematized methodology of bidirectional engagement that articulates the identification of skills gaps with the design of university training offerings; each institution addresses this task based on its own experience, generally under market-driven logics, without that accumulated practice translating into shared knowledge. This essay argues that the lifelong learning approach promoted by UNESCO and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning offers a conceptual framework that not only justifies, but renders necessary, the integration of teaching and engagement with the broader social environment. Drawing on a review of the Chilean institutional framework for labor market forecasting and of the literature on the linkage between Higher Education Institutions and the productive sector, the paper contends that the observed fragmentation is not a technical problem but a structural one, and that overcoming it requires a shared methodology, updated quality assurance criteria, and a public policy commitment that exceeds the capacities of any single institution.