The purpose of this article was to encourage the debate on the policies and programs that have been being offered to workers since the enactment of decree 2.208/97, justified by the discourse of inclusion, as a strategy to face the structural unemployment that characterizes the flexible accumulation system. Given the expressive production that already exists on the perverse impacts of the above-mentioned decree, an option was made to present, in synthesis, the results of the survey we have been undertaking in the past few years seeking to understand the categories that govern these policies and offers in this accumulation system. To do so, the article is divided into two parts; the first analyzes the categories that configure professional education in flexible accumulation emphasizing the flexible arrangements of differentiated competencies, to which general education and new scientific ant tacit knowledge combinations make decisive contributions as a result of competency intellectualization. The second part, meanwhile, analyzes the professional education policies that pinpoint the State's action in the flexible accumulation system: the increasing privatization movement underpinned by specific legislation, fragmentation, and the loss of quality in the paths that lead to qualification.
professional education; educational policies; loss of quality in work and education