To keep pace with changing skills, today's industrial workers are in need of three distinct kinds of competencies: vocational, technical, and multifunctional. France has chosen to focus on technical skills and upgrade the level of vocational education. All three skills are necessary to production, and no one is more important than the other. This is also true of the profiles of the workers applying them. Three such profiles can be defined according to the predominant skills used: multifunctional, technical, and vocational. According to current business practices, firms use different types of recruitment to correspond to these three profiles. As demonstrated by developments in the 1980s, the French educational system has a considerable capacity for modernization, but it is also marked by the primacy of general education over technical and occupational training. The French academic system favors the spread of scientific and technical skills and takes an increasing distance from the teaching of vocational skills, which are assuming less and less importance in the curriculum and the exam system alike. The first of two possible scenarios presumes the primacy of the technical profile. Such a trend runs the risk of overcrowding technical training tracks with a certain deskilling of graduates. The second scenario presumes vocational education attuned to the diversity and complementarity of worker skills; a whole range of jobs is viewed as a continuum. (13 references) (YLB)