Founded in 1994, IPERIA L’Institut is an organization striving to recognize and value home and family employment with the assumed goal of ensuring trust and quality in the professional bonds between employers and employees.
Today, its Director-General, Baptiste LENFANT delivers his conception of IPERIA’s model and discloses its advantages and future endeavors.
What is the role of IPERIA L’Institut in France ? To what extent is IPERIA an actor for social change?
As a skills’ validating operator, IPERIA acts as a warrantor of domestic workers’ professional value. Its purpose is to make our society take a different glance at these strongly Human-driven jobs in order to raise public acknowledgment over an estimated 1.4 million workers and also to create vocations.
Let’s not forget the estimated 3.4 million domestic employers either. Their choice for domestic employment is an answer to a very intimate requirement of their private life. That answer must be fulfilled by a competent and adequate person to ensure its quality. It vouches all the more an increased trust between employer and worker and a peaceful working relationship.
For over 25 years we have been taking a careful look at the evolutions of our fellow citizens’ demands but also at the developments of jobs and skills of this area strongly connected to the major demographic, environmental, digital and robotic transitions. This gives us a chance to design innovative professionalization tools, adapted to the specificities of this employment model. All of this happens in partnership with a network of over 230 training operators working closely with us to increase skills and give a new visibility to jobs such as maternal assistants, childcare workers, family workers, daily life assistants and all of those fulfilling a person’s daily needs.
How is that model also a tool for social integration?
Demographic changes as well as the important role given to private home in ageing and dependency-related public policies provide substantial employment perspectives in this professional field. Many of the job appliers appear to having been remote from the labour market for many years – or often own an immigration background.
To try and converge with these issues, we have developed training and skills’ certification platforms whose goal is to facilitate their professional insertion and therefore to foster their social integration. As an example, we have set out over 10 years ago a professionalization program entitled “French as a professional skill”. The latter seeks to enhance French learning courses based upon real life work situations. French as a professional skill happens to be quite fundamental in carrying out these jobs – both in the daily relation with the employing family or with the person cared for, but also to properly grasp each of its different needs or demands.
What are IPERIA’s perspectives in a near future?
To provide a relevant response to the increase of domestic needs – this combined with a raise of retirement rates among the sector’s active population; our biggest challenge in France is to draw new candidates and most especially young people. That is why we wish to make apprenticeship more broadly possible.
Let’s not forget that the French model of private domestic employment relies to this day on a solid structure. Both innovative and inspiring, it can be considered a reference throughout Europe as much as internationally when dealing with the main societal challenges awaiting States all over the world.Beyond European projects we have been involving in and a partnership with an African training operator we have already initiated, our endeavour is now to strengthen our implication on an international level to be present for any person showing interest for these topics; this also to raise universal recognition of the economic and social role overtaken by families and households and of the professional value of employees who take part to the social cohesion of an ever-changing world thanks to their hard work.
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A social Europe that works for every home