Chapter 21. Re-skilling and inequalities of capabilities in France: how socio-economic groups matter

Re-skilling has become a central feature to making worker's career path more secure but also to responding to labour market shortages and supporting the green and digital transitions. However, the implementation of these policy lines raises delicate questions as to how the responsibility for reskilling should be shared. The capability approach is used here to raise critical issues about transformations of reskilling policies. Based on the French longitudinal quantitative survey DEFIS, the study show that the implementation of these policy lines contributes to shape inequalities between social groups of the capability to attend reskilling programs and to secure their career paths: low-skilled workers have less capability for reskilling ensuing from the fact that they operate in more opaque environments, less benefit from ambitious reskilling schemes, and face fewer valuable achievements. What makes their pathway so difficult to achieve doesn't depend so much on their motivation or willpower.