Margarita Campillo Díaz Amalia Ayala De la Peña José Santiago Álvarez Muñoz ^* Mª Ángeles Hernández-Prados

• University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

Labour consolidation is not a sufficient criterion to abandon the need for the qualification and requalification of professionals, especially in the field of education, which must respond to the uncertainties of society in the light of trends and advances incorporated in pedagogical research. The present qualitative study analyzes the training demands of social education professionals from their own perspective, using their own stories in a semi-structured interview format conducted to 75 key informants from governmental and non-governmental organizations in southeastern Spain, specifically, from the autonomous community of the region of Murcia. According to the results, the most frequent formative limitations in the reports of practising professionals are those referred to the field of social policies, legislative training and administrative processing, specialized work in specific sectors or collectives and mediation, among the most significant. Similarly, the results cast a finding of fashion themes (mental health, gender) and reiteration of non-exclusive conditioners of social education, extrapolable to other areas such as the increasing bureaucracy and complexity in the proceedings as common places in the reflection of professionals with their own initiative and commitment to their own updating that is associated with a reflective criticism of their own professionalization. The variety of answers and topics, evident in the number of descriptors needed for the categorization and their dispersed percentage representation, allows us to conclude that the continued training from the view of the professionals in practice does not allow excessive specialization, despite the modes, and requires a wide variety of offer adjusted to the versatility of situations to meet.