Abstract:

Despite high levels of unemployment in Brazil, companies have difficulty fulfilling open work positions. Main reason is the lack of available qualified professionals. It gets worse as the level of schooling increases. On the other hand, thousands of students annually finish college, and it has increased in the last decades. The number of students in higher education schools in Brazil has increased around four times in the last two decades. However, only a few of these students are prepared to cover employers' demands, as verified on proficiency exams’ approval. Besides the academic education level, there is also a gap between what the companies expect from the students and what they hand on in the practice and the behavioral skills. Dual System education is a work-integrated learning where the student learns through coordinated activities in two institutions, a school and a workplace, which can reduce the gap and decrease unemployment. Despite the benefits of dual study methodology, which has been successfully used for decades in East Europe, it is barely known in Brazil, and just started in two Brazilian universities. Once it is very recent in Brazil, there is a lack in this subject study, which can greatly contribute to the development of this kind of education method in Brazil. There are many questions to be answered, which can add real contributions in the academic, educational, and professional spheres, thereby contributing to society in general. The development of Dual Study in Brazilian higher education courses can generate many benefits such as: decrease of unemployment and reduce the gap between what companies need and what students learn in schools; optimize resources from companies, students and schools on getting adequate knowledge; contribute to the development of Education and its evolution to new times and new demands; and social development resulted from students' quality of life improve. Dual study has three main participants, the students, the companies and the education institutions. It's necessary to clarify the benefits for these three parts, in order to facilitate the reply of these implementations. The objective of this paper is to explain Dual Study's main characteristics, the benefits for the three parts (companies, students and higher education institutions) and to compare Brazil case with existing literature. The study of these concepts and benefits are obtained through a bibliographic review on the dual teaching theme and on previous studies of benefits generated by this teaching method. Also, information about the first two higher education dual study courses are collected through questionnaires with the students and interviews with course coordinators, comparing Brazil's case with literature findings. Once this teaching methodology happens inside a social environment, the theoretical basis of this study is the theory of Situated Learning, which considers learning involved in a social context, and not only in isolated individual learning processes. It considers the learning as set of factors involved that make a learner a full participant in a sociocultural practice and treat learning as an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice.

Keywords:

Dual study in Brazil, higher education, work-based training benefits.