Blogging the Convention

‘We’re good at measuring people as costs but bad at measuring them as assets.’

UK leaders and managers have a poor record when it comes to recognising and building a ‘high value workforce’. This was a key message that emerged from the session with Dr Laurie Bassi, celebrated US economist and expert on human capital management (or HCM) and Professor John Philpott, Chief Economist at the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development.

For the uninitiated, HCM essentially means taking a strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organisation's people (the most valued assets) and how they contribute to business objectives. This includes investing in staff training and development and enlightened HR practices.

Given the compelling evidence presented by Dr Bassi which showed a strong correlation between HCM practices and business performance, coupled with the fact that global forces (globalisation, technology, demography, regulatory change) mean that the profitability of firms in developed nations will depend on business strategies based on human capital, it seems surprising that so few UK businesses have seen the light – the question is ‘why not?’

Four reasons stood out during the discussions:

• Firstly, the lack of leadership and management skills in the UK; a theme which has run throughout the 2010 policy convention. In particular the need to upgrade the skills of HR managers so that they become strategic partners, not just processors, in delivering high performance businesses.

• Secondly, a sense of inertia in management culture which may result from lack of information and awareness about HCM processes and practices

• Thirdly, the context of a firm’s product market strategy: Linking to David Ashton’s presentation in a previous session (1) some UK firms use low-wage, low-skilled labour which means there is no incentive to follow the ‘high road’. Governments could introduce product market regulation but this would need to be light-touch.

• Finally, the labour market context: if we want to move businesses up the value chain, governments should either limit the supply of low wage labour or the ability of employers to hire it (likely to be unpopular among employers).

Old ideas die hard and it seems that when it comes to management culture, the UK is no exception. It is interesting that issues around skills utilisation, high performance working and the role of leaders and managers have emerged in different guises throughout this policy convention. So watch this space for some ideas about how the UK Commission will take forward this critical agenda.

Katherine Chapman

(1) To read more reflections on David Ashton’s presentation, please see the link in the Comments box below.

Although small (population 5 million, roughly the size of Scotland) Singapore punches well above its weight with a high growth, prosperous economy, high employment levels and world class infrastructure. Singapore also has a high quality education system and impressive participation rates, so what lessons can the UK learn?

Well, it’s not all rosy – like many advanced post-industrial societies, including the UK, Singapore has an ageing population. It also relies heavily on foreign labour (1.25m non-residents), a policy once actively pursued by the government to fill labour shortages.

However, since 2003 and the establishment of the Workforce Development Agency (WDA), the government has started to focus on lifelong learning and continuing education and training (CET) in recognition of the need to re-train and re-skill the current workforce, particularly older workers. Older workers in Singapore are also those least educated and most vulnerable which poses a significant challenge for policy-makers. There is also a growing interest in the means to tackle Singapore’s relatively low growth in productivity and a new focus on high performance working and job redesign to tackle that.

To this end the Institute for Adult Learning was also set up in April 2008, to improve the quality of the CET workforce. Their Chief Executive, Dr Gary Willmott and colleague Joyce Tan described to a captivated audience what they and the WDA have been doing to promote workforce training and lifelong learning in Singapore.

Interestingly, there are some major similarities with the UK including the recent development of sectoral qualification strategies and competency-based frameworks, including recognition of prior learning, to upgrade existing workers.

On the other hand, some interesting innovations include policies to redesign low-skill, low-paid and low-attractive jobs to improve productivity and retention rates (these have impacted some 43,000 workers) and ‘Reemployment policies’ designed to keep older workers in jobs. For example this includes an obligation on employers to offer alternate or revised jobs to retiring workers.

Arguably, what makes all of this easier in Singapore is the limited number of intermediary bodies that exist in the CET system (ie the WDA) and the historically close collaboration between industry, government and the trade unions.

This seminar marked only the start of the conversation with our Singapore partners and many fascinating points arose in discussions which could be pursued further. These ranged from the impact of the recession, to industrial policies to develop high-tech sectors, to the persistent widening income gap in Singapore. Despite significant differences, there are some interesting comparisons between Singapore and the UK – comparisons which certainly warrant further debate.

Katherine Chapman

In response to the financial crisis, China have embarked on an ambitious training programme (to the tune of £30 billion) to improve entrepreneurship skills and provide support to the 22% of graduates who cannot find work.

China's entrepreneurship programme is based on their findings that for every one graduate starting a company, they will employ eight new members of staff. This is almost double the number of job creations achieved from businesses founded by individuals with lower skilled backgrounds.

Dr. Ma Liang (senior advisor to the Chinese Government on entrepreneurship training) pointed out that China's internship initiatives hadn't proved so successful because companies were protective over access to their key product and service offerings. This new scheme provides a simulated working environment and allows graduates to adopt real-life roles such as a finance or HR director. The types of social skills and attitudes the programme hopes to foster relate to 'guanxi' or the ability to forge interpersonal relationships when doing business in China.

Yet, the question emerges as to affordability of the scheme versus the return achieved in job growth for the economy. The proof, says Dr. Ma, is in the return on entrepreneurship skills investment. Currently 35% of students who receive training go on to set up their own business, satisfying the twin goals of a better skilled workforce and job creation. When NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) tells us that half of all jobs created between 2002-8 come from small and medium-sized high growth businesses, what more could the UK be doing to leverage these employment opportunities? There may be reasons for us to learn from China's investment in entrepreneurship in the coming years. Watch this space...

Rebecca Jones

I used to think that providing people with more skills automatically increases their productivity - after all, better skilled people can perform more complicated tasks, tend to be more innovative and can contribute generally more to their organisation’s performance. This analogy makes sense and has underpinned government policy for years; why else would policy-makers be so concerned with raising skills levels? Furthermore, as our own evidence shows (1) workers with higher skill levels are better off than people with lower skill levels.

However, as the speakers at the Skills Utilisation and High Performance Working workshop demonstrated, unfortunately, it’s not always that straightforward. On the contrary, it seems that after the initial skills acquisition there is a lot that needs to happen to turn this potential (the skills a person has) into actual performance (positive changes in the way we do our jobs).

A good example for that is Scotland: it has a more highly qualified workforce than the rest of the UK but this is not reflected in productivity rates. Policy-makers in Scotland have therefore come to the conclusion that, as Dr Janet Lowe (Scottish Funding Council and Skills Development Scotland) explained, investing in skills cannot be enough. To put it simply, having a skill doesn’t mean that we actually apply it. I think most of us have, at some point during their working life, been in jobs where we have felt that our employer doesn’t make good use of our skills and talents and that we aren’t able to contribute as much as we like. Yet this is an important element for job quality, and job quality in turn has strong links with performance (see the Workshop on Improving Job Quality – A Contribution To Productivity (2)).

We probably all agree that this isn’t a good situation for both employees and employers, and it’s probably also not hard to work out that a work environment that encourages and supports workers to apply their skills is good for business performance. This also makes skills utilisation especially important in times of recession (this has also been discussed in the workshop on Building a High Value Workforce ).The question is, however, how do we create such work environments?

One way to improve skills utilisation is through a system of High Performance Working practices – this is where it gets complicated. According to our second speaker, Professor David Ashton (Leicester University), this is an alternative to the traditional ‘command and control’ culture and it’s based on high trust and high responsibility, resulting in a greater autonomy for workers who aren’t confined to carry out a specific task but take on broader responsibilities with a performance-based reward. This system can of course, as Professor Ashton acknowledges, be abused by employers to make people work harder instead of smarter, which is why trust is key, otherwise employees would not feed back their tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is, according to Ian Brinkley (the Work Foundation), an important element of jobs at a time when a lot of our jobs become more knowledge intensive. Yet, according to a study carried out by the Work Foundation many of employees feel their skills aren’t utilised and that they have low control and autonomy. Furthermore, two thirds of employees think their company is still primarily based on rules rather than loyalty and trust (3).

This throws up two important questions in my mind: if HPW can offer a solution to this dilemma, why aren’t many companies implementing it, and what can the government do to change that? The workshop panel managed to provide some answers to this: according to Dr Lowe, leadership and management are crucial but the UK lacks in well qualified managers (our synthesis paper on HPW also outlines other barriers (4)). For David Ashton key drivers of HPW are culture, values and market forces, however he concedes that there is no ‘silver bullet’. Drawing on his research on product market strategies, he also argues that regulation, for instance, standards regulations can be used as a building bloc for HPW, e.g. in the tourist sector raising standards is a powerful tool to shape business strategies. But he also points out that we already have all the policy levers to encourage HPW, we just need to use them better! This also reflects the conclusion of our HPW Policy Review (coming out shortly – watch this space!).

Of course many people will feel uneasy at the thought of government intervening into what happens inside the workplace. But the speakers made it clear that this is not what this agenda is about, clearly, employers are, and must remain, in control of the management of their own organisations and businesses. The role of public policy can only ever be to support employers in this area.

What was most striking about the workshop, and indeed the whole conference, was that there was a clear shift in people’s minds towards the realisation that skills upgrading alone is not enough. Now we need to make sure that this shift also takes places in our workplaces.

Katerina Rüdiger

To view the documents referenced in this blog post, please see the comments box below.

Speakers: Simon Duffy, Centre for Welfare Reform; Geoff Mulgan, Director, The Young Foundation; John Stone, Chief Executive, Learning and Skills Network.
Chaired by: Ian Kinder, Assistant Director of Strategy and Performance, UK Commission.

The conference has set out the huge challenges the UK faces in meeting its ambitions for skills and employment by 2020. These include globalisation, including competition from the China, India and other BRIC economies, a crisis in public finances, the recent recession, demographics and the aging population – I could go on.

It’s in the context of this hugely complex and bewildering array of issues that we asked our three speakers the rather difficult question of how we could create a system that is fit to respond to these challenges in 10 minutes or less. Instead of faltering at this impossible task all three speakers provided fascinating incites.

The recent UK Commission report Skills, Jobs Growth set out the need for empowering customers in the employment and skills system and Simon Duffy provided some intriguing analysis of where this has been achieved in the world of adult social care. Simon is a leader in the development of individual budgets and self-directed support in social care and citing this as an example of transformational change he provided some tips on how this can be done successfully.

In particular he highlighted the differences between “technology” (not just IT but the means by which we deliver policy) and policy itself, which is written and by and controlled by a small number of people in government and is therefore slow to change, while technology, in Simon’s terms, is far less so. Furthermore ideas must be shared, improved, developed, bent and reshaped throughout the process, we shouldn’t be removed from the day to day pragmatics. Finally there have been both economic and outcome improvements as a result of the move to self-directed support but importantly market forces are not the key driver here. Instead it is the energy and innovation that individuals bring to the system when they are allowed to do so.

Geoff Mulgan, who recently was head of the Prime Minister’s Strategy unit and has set up the Young Foundation, set out his view that transformational change needs to be guided by a clear diagnosis of the system’s problems and that policy alone is not enough, innovation in delivery is also required. In his view the core problem with UK’s system is that many young people leaving school, college and university lack “SEED” skills (social intelligence, emotional resilience, enterprise and discipline).

The Young Foundation are not only thinking about and advocating these issues but are also seeking to put their ideas into practice with their work on teaching young people resilience and collaboration skills, mixing work and learning at school, traditional one-to-one apprenticeships, peer support for graduates and the intriguing “School of Everything”. The School of Everything is a website which aims to broker relationships between anyone who wants to learn anything with anyone willing to teach, previous research has shown that there are over one million teachers who are not part of the formal system in the UK.

John Stone opened his presentation by trying to convince us that he was in favour of planning before giving us a whole host of reasons why planning can and does go wrong, whether it be planning your journey into work or planning which courses a college should provide. Not only is the future unforeseeable, the credit crunch is an obvious example, but in many areas individuals and markets do not act rationally and therefore forecasts are almost always wrong.

But all is not lost! The fact that we can’t predict the future doesn’t matter as long the system is flexible enough to respond and there is sufficient feedback information. However, separation of policy and delivery across the public sector, a trend going back 20 years or so, exacerbates the problems of uncertainty, unpredictability and rapid change. In short institutions need to be more accountable, there needs to be less targeting but more information so the system can’t be its own judge and own jury and more innovation.

David Massey

'You can do anything with a piece of Number 8 wire'. This, in a sense, summarises Janice Shiner’s narrative of the New Zealand skills system.

Number 8 wire, so the New Zealand tale goes, can be deployed for all kinds of purposes, from mending a tractor, to fixing fencing wire.

Within the context of the skills system, it stands as a symbol for adaptability, entrepreneurialism and a pioneering spirit.

In this workshop Shiner considered how the learning providers of New Zealand – the universities and colleges, the Wãnanga, the private training providers, the Industry Training Organisations - could metaphorically forge their own piece of Number 8 wire and become responsive, more empowered and more innovative.

It is about fostering a sense of innovation whilst simultaneously establishing parameters in which training providers can work.

It is about removing the delivery chain and letting go of the (sometimes) deadening weight of bureaucracy.

It is about having neither tight regulation nor absolute freedom.

In this workshop, it struck me that this desire to ‘liberate’ the system, so that it can be driven by the needs of the labour market, has been echoed over and over again.

For instance, the UK Commission’s strategy paper Skills, Jobs, Growth states that:

Too much central planning and too tight control on the detail of provider activity has led to inflexibility rather than responsiveness. (p. 25)

It calls for a ‘systematic and successful transfer of trust and increased autonomy to organisations’ in order to help shape a ‘strategic, agile and labour market led employment and skills system (p. 25).

Janice Shiner’s reference to learning providers being empowered to ‘get on with it’, to trust that sense of what they need to do in order to succeed, also made me think of the film Precious.

This film is haunting and brutal but it also meditates on the transformative power of education. So far, so Dead Poet’s Society. Yet Precious, for me, in its depiction of a makeshift, ‘alternative school’ in a run-down building, told the story of a learning provider with that ‘Number 8’ spirit, improvising and adapting to meet needs and helping the main character, sixteen year old Claireece Precious Jones to move from seventh grade to high school and inspiring her to aim for college.

From the UK Commission’s 2009 publication to a film set in 1987 Harlem, there have been many calls to create ‘a more responsive education and training system’ (Goal Three of the NZ Skills Strategy).

The question is how to develop this in order to meet the needs of the labour market and also support the real life Precious.

Catherine Hodgkinson

Tom Schuller from NIACE presented some of the key findings from the Learning Through Life Enquiry at this very informative seminar.

Tricia Hartley from the Campaign for Learning kindly stepped in at the last minute to cover for Dr Ulrich Schoof who was unavoidably absent.

Tom began with some scene setting and an interesting chart which showed where the £55bn that was spent on skills from public and private sources in 2007-08 came from.

The vast majority (86%) of this spend is on individuals who are under 25 and Tom argued that this distribution will not make sense going forward as there will be fewer young people.

Tom’s wider point in relation to the distribution is that the concentration is on the wrong age group.

We are staying healthier and working longer than other generations and so the learning needs of people over 50 shouldn’t continue to take a back seat.

The enquiry has looked at various ways in which a culture of learning can be embedded and Tom talked through some of the issues in implementing four of these:

•Increased co-investment – responsibility for funding can’t just lie with the state, employers and individuals need to also play a part. There are currently few instances where learning is funded by all three;

•Individual learning accounts – this may not have been successful in the past but this does not mean that the concept is flawed, potentially just that a different mode of delivery needs to be found. Scotland has individual learning accounts and England could learn from this;

•Strategy setting at a local level – not necessarily that all funding should be devolved to local authorities but that decision making at this level can more easily involve the key players including employers;

•Changing the structure of work to enable more time to pursue learning – the 25-50 age group can overwhelmed by work and family pressures and cite these as barriers to undertaking learning. There are more flexible employment structures that would enable people to find a better balance.

Tricia’s comments and the debate that followed from the questions was underpinned by the call for a more nuanced debate about what we mean by skills development.

The Leitch report underlines the importance of people developing skills through achievement of qualifications but we need to remember that qualifications are a proxy for skills and a focus on qualifications at the expense of all else risks downgrading the importance of more informal types of learning in the workplace.

A focus on qualifications also risks side-stepping the issue about utilisation – we may have a more qualified supply of individuals but to make a difference to productivity individuals need to be able to utilise these skills in the workplace.

The role of Union Learning Representatives provides a peer to peer support mechanism to encourage individuals to take up learning at work and supports individuals to make the case to their employers of the importance of developing more skills, whether this is formally or informally.

Alison Morris

Introducing our speakers: Mark Franks from the Migration Advisory Committee (the folk providing independent advice to government on skilled migration, most notably the shortage occupations list); and Elizabeth Collett from the Migration Policy Institute, a business cluster of migration nerds (her words not mine!) based in Washington D.C.

After taking us on a whistle-stop tour of the work of the MAC and presenting UK migration stats and figures, Mark gave us a sense of the labour market impact of migration. Not an easy task.

Two points stood out for me...apart from it being a complex picture. First, the “lump of labour fallacy” – the number of jobs is not fixed, so there is not a one-for-one displacement when migrants arrive, they’ll take on different jobs, and also create jobs.

Secondly, the problem when measuring impact is there is no counterfactual – we just don’t know what the UK labour market would look like without migration.

The key issue now though, Mark identified, is not just how we get the people the UK economy needs as we come out of recession, but also how migration links to the acquisition of skills of UK workers (and ensure migration does not provide a disincentive to workers and employers to upskill).

Going forward, the MAC will be working with partners (including the UK Commission), to strengthen the links between skills and migration policy.

Over time we need to work to ensure there is less need to fill skills gaps through migration, but rather incentivise upskilling in key areas.

The following comment struck me however: government departments should develop a holistic strategy for upskilling workers as well as using the points based migration system – health and education are two of its biggest users. This may raise questions on the need for some joined-up policy.

Changing tack, Elizabeth’s focus was on the international experience of attracting and utilising foreign talent.

Sidestepping the discussion on fostering home-grown talent, Elizabeth highlighted the importance of highly skilled migrants to national labour markets.

In Singapore she noted skilled immigrants contributed 37% to total GDP growth in the 1990’s – yet comprised only 13% of the total workforce.

She noted foreign talent can play a variety of key functions including bringing in critical expertise, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Attracting the best foreign talent can be a competitive business, so how can a country capitalise on its competitive advantage and market itself to talented migrants?

Elizabeth suggested the inherent conditions in a country were a factor, such as R&D, business clusters, social welfare, lifestyle, and language. Incentives could be used however to make destinations more attractive.

Importantly, and an issue often overlooked Elizabeth suggested, is that migration policy should not just be about attracting talent but also using highly skilled migrants to their fullest potential.

Following her tour of international best practice in this respect, there are possibly lessons we can learn in the UK.

Perhaps inevitably, the final discussions turned back to the tensions that exist within the system to ensure UK workers get jobs and opportunities to upskill.

Elizabeth had the final word – there are trade-offs, and it is a danger to rely on one and not the other.

Genna Kik

“Skills activism” is at the heart of recent developments in skills policy.

As Mark Spilsbury outlined in his introduction to this lively session, skills activism is about identifying the skills needed for economic growth, and improving the responsiveness of the skills system.

But as Ewart Keep of SKOPE pointed out in a typically incisive (and provocative) presentation, these have long been central objectives of skills policy.

So exactly what is new about skills activism? Ewart Keep observed that one element of skills activism that does mark a change is the emphasis on identifying 'new skills for new industries.'

Here the government has identified a set of ‘emerging sectors’ including low carbon energy generation, advanced manufacturing and the digital and creative industries.

Although Ewart Keep and his fellow speaker, Dinah Caine of the Sector Skills Council Skillset, recognised the value in this, I found it reassuring that they agreed that skills activism should not restrict itself to these emerging sectors.

Although they may have significant economic potential, these sectors are not major sources of employment.

The strategic skills agenda must not lose sight of the biggest sectors in the economy in jobs terms, and those that will be affected by important trends such as demographic change.

Another new element of skills activism is the role it gives to Labour Market Information (LMI) in informing decision-making.

Ewart Keep noted that great strides have been made in LMI in the past two decades, and the Strategic Skills Audit being produced by the UK Commission will provide a valuable contribution here.

However, he also usefully pointed out that information needs to reach a broad audience: not just policy makers but employers and individuals making choices about their careers too.

Reflecting on her recent experience of an early exercise in skills activism – producing the ‘Digital Britain’ report, Dinah Caine also warned of the difficulty involved in getting the leverage to create change.

The important lesson here was that providing high quality LMI is not enough in itself.

Difficult decisions still need to be taken. Effective partnership working will be crucial in order to bring out the ‘active’ in skills activism.

Dr Vicki Belt

What do we mean when we talk about job quality?

This session addressed this question and looked at where the UK stands.

At the outset Francis Green of the University of Kent argued that job quality involves looking at the extent to which a person’s needs in work are met.

I found this a very useful definition as it encourages us to look not only at ‘extrinsic’ aspects of jobs such as pay and conditions, but also at the ‘intrinsic’ aspects - or the nature and experience of work itself.

Evidence was presented on extrinsic job quality.

Radoslaw Owczarzak of the European Foundation reported on recent survey findings showing that the UK is behind other European countries (although not at the bottom of the pile) in the use of forward-thinking practices such as flexi-time with accumulated hours, profit sharing and share ownership.

Francis Green noted - surprisingly I thought – improvements in pay in recent years, particularly for those in top jobs.

However, the picture is more negative for intrinsic job quality.

Francis Green argued that there has been a downward trend in worker autonomy, with evidence of a real lack of trust in British workplaces.

Radoslaw Owcarzak reported too that ‘predominately autonomous’ teamworking is practiced in only around 25% of workplaces in the UK, compared to 50% or more in Sweden and Denmark.

Francis Green insightfully pointed out that this is especially worrying when we consider some other key labour market trends.

We know there has been an increase in the number of jobs in the UK economy requiring high level skills, and that the share of graduates in the labour market has increased.

This might lead us to expect an increase in worker autonomy, not a decrease.

This seems like a recipe for frustration as well as wasted opportunity.

For me it also chimed with an astute observation made in another session: rather than asking (as it often the case) whether graduates are ready for jobs, do we instead need to ask whether jobs are ready for graduates? UK employers need to get much better at harnessing the potential of their (increasingly higher skilled) employees.

Allowing more autonomy is crucial here. This sounds simple enough, but it requires a significant shift in management culture.

Dr Vicki Belt

The workshop presented the findings from five projects commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the role for employment and skills in breaking cycles of poverty. The speakers were Chris Goulden, Dr Tracy Shildrick, Dr Mark Tomlinson, Dr Kathryn Ray, Professor Ron McQuaid and Hilary Metcalf.

All the projects looked at the concept of ‘recurrent poverty’ where people move in and out of poverty over length of time.

The projects include both qualitative and quantitative research and look at the issue from the point of view of individuals and employers.

The issues discussed were wide ranging and complex and this summary provides just a few key points.

Childcare emerged as a key barrier which is not necessarily that surprising but the research highlighted some subtleties.

Finding affordable convenient childcare is not just a barrier to starting work but is also a barrier to accepting a job.

In other words, an individual can’t accept a job until they know exactly what hours are expected and what hours they are able to do.

This difficult to know until childcare has been arranged but it isn’t possible to sort childcare until you have a job... and so people get trapped in a vicious circle.

These difficulties are compounded by some unintended consequences of the childcare element of Working Tax Credit which can mean that working parents fall into debt.

Whilst employment is a route out of poverty the conditions of the job can determine whether people escape poverty or cycle between low pay and no pay.

Temporary jobs with poor benefits and no defined progression routes do not help people escape the poverty cycle.

This raises interesting questions about what the role state should play.

This is a complex area, there are issues about how the state could legislate to increase the rights of temporary workers, the question of whether the minimum wage level is appropriate across the country or whether employers should be introducing a ‘living wage’, and about the role the state should/could play in encouraging employers to offer permanent employment opportunities with good pay and benefits.

The need for effective advice was a key theme. Skills development is one factor that can help people escape the poverty cycle but is not always the most important.

People who have been in the low pay/no pay cycle are likely to have complicated lives and other factors including caring responsibilities, how the benefits system works and attitude and confidence all play a part.

The importance of confidence and attitude cannot be under-estimated. Having low confidence levels and a negative attitude can stop people getting into work but can also keep people in low paid poor quality jobs due to the fear of change – people can value the stability of even a poor quality job.

This highlights the need for effective advice. This needs to be proactive – often people caught in the poverty cycle will not know where to go to get advice. Good advice needs to address practical issues such as where to get in work support and to highlight progression routes.

Alison Morris

Those hoping for heated argument would have been well advised to stay away from the workshop on understanding and meeting employers’ needs on Monday morning.

Richard Brown, former head of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, Olga Strietska-Ilina, specialist in skills development at the International Labour Organisation, and assorted guests representing employers and skills specialists were all in agreement over the ways education providers could address the needs of employers.

Their conclusion: specialised courses and specific training fail to address basic, generic competencies that all employers require.

There was plenty of detail to back this up, of course: Ms Strietska-Ilena presented a statistics-rich narrative of how successful countries have strategically focused their skills investments, and how the global financial crisis has exacerbated latent structural problems, rather than creating sectoral shift in and of itself.

Her slides picked out some fascinating nuggets, including the way in which adult retraining is itself helping one industry defy the recession, with greater demand for adult learning teachers creating an uptick in employment.

She also sounded a warning for those governments sinking deficit spending into stimulus programmes; investments in technology, she said, had to be matched by investments in training and human resources, otherwise any recovery would be sluggish and shortlived.

Mr Brown, himself formerly of an industry/education body, called for educators to put what he called “the process of learning” at the heart of their courses, alongside generic, transferable skills that all employers require – and consistently complain that even bright young graduates do not possess.

Specific courses addressing tightly focused skills needs could only go so far. “Increasing skills,” he said, “is a supply-side answer to a demand-side question.”

Representatives of sector skills councils in the audience commented that, although they represented some mega-employers, their member companies were primarily small or micro-businesses – often with single figures of employees.

How could they be expected to take on apprentices, or spend time training up new graduates? That, Mr Brown said, only went to show that the transferable employability skills he championed were more important than ever.

Ken Manson

From its title many would have been forgiven for thinking this was going to be a session driven by an in-depth examination of statistics on training spend and economic data on returns to employer and individuals. It turned out to be anything but, and I hope those who attended found this session refreshing rather than frustrating as we wanted to explore some wider considerations of learning for and within work and draw on international experience.

Our two speakers provided excellent and engaging insight. Marita Aho from the Confederation of Finnish industries provided the industry insight and international experience while Professor Lorna Unwin from the University of London spoke about the importance of creating workplaces that are conducive to learning and appropriate to the firm and highlighted the characteristics of workplaces that provide effective learning environments.

Key themes emerging from the session:

•The vast majority of training isn’t conspicuous, formal, accredited. With so much informal learning taking place it’s vital that the environment in which informal learning takes place is conducive to learning.

•The importance of creating an environment which encourages the use of skills acquired so that learning doesn’t just happen for its own sake and investment has the intended impact.

•The importance of a tripartite approach to encouraging sufficient and effective investment in skills. This is particularly evident in the Finnish context where the institutional framework encourages employers to work in long established collaborative networks and where training plans are compulsory. As a result 95% of training is funded by employers.

•The importance of training being shaped by and delivered in support of firm strategy.

•It’s important that training isn’t confined to the roles and occupations that historically have benefited from regular training. Individuals at all levels can benefit.

Let us have your questions, comments and your own key themes.

Richard Garrett, Research Manager, UK Commission for Employment and Skills

Welcome to the official blog of Skills, Jobs, Growth. We will be reporting live from the conference on Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th February. Please feel free to leave comments to our posts and give us your opinions and ideas - we want to hear from you.

Enjoy the conference.