A highly skilled and adaptable workforce is often seen as the solution to challenges associated with a globalized, knowledge-driven economy. Concepts like lifelong learning and employability point to the necessity for education and training at different stages in peoples' life. As a result, labor market training policies supporting multiple forms of non-formal, informal and formal learning activities are central to national policy-making in advance industrial nations (Green, 2002). In this context, adults' participation in education continues to be one of the most studied areas in the field of adult and continuing education. The emphasis on lifelong learning polices among European countries has renewed the importance to increase and enhance adult participation in education. It is well known the importance of attitudes toward education as an essential aspect of the decision to participate (Blunt & Yang, 2002). Understanding why adults participate in education and how to structure educational programs to optimize their benefits has been longstanding research in the field (Merriam & Caffarella, 1999).

Within the Lisbon Strategy framework, European countries give primacy to job-related training programmes as a basic component of the European social model and promote agreements between partners under the lifelong learning vision. Governments have supported the development of regulations that affect workplace learning in a range of different forms. It may concern skill formation through the education and training system, which impacts on the skills and knowledge applied in the workplace. In the Spanish case, the statement of the Professional Training for Employment Subsystem in 2007 was the result of a historical and contextual process of several agreements between the state, trade unions and stakeholders. This regulation sets a framework that intends to introduce unified mechanisms to express workers' and enterprises' training needs, and to work together with the State and with educational providers in order to meet new labour demands.  This framework has encouraged the development of a great amount of job-related training courses offer by social partners.

This presentation aims to analyze adults' motivation to participate in job-related training courses and their expected outcomes. Concepts like motivation, commitment and incentives have increasingly been assessed as important determinants of human behavior (Daahlen & Ure, 2009). As argued by Illeris (2003) motivation to participate in educational training programs may depend on different features such as age, gender, educational level, and labor status. Unemployed people may enter an educational program to qualify for a job, while people who already have a job more often attend courses to improve their qualifications or for personal development reasons. Previous findings show that adults' motivation for education is multifaceted (Daahlen & Ure, 2009). For a broader understanding of motivation several reasons for participation are needed to consider. The question that we raise is: does motivation to participate in job-related training programs differ according to educational level and labor status or other characteristic of the people involved?  In this study, fourteen reasons for participation were examined, which reflect social, personal and job-related aspects. 

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