Monthly Archives: November 2007

At the drop of Geoffrey Boycott’s hat

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What have the cult radio programme, Test Match Special (TMS), and the eLearning Network (eLN) in common? Leaving aside any suggestion that both engage – at the drop of Geoffrey Boycott’s now famous hat – in detailed speculation on obscure and arcane issues, the answer is ‘cake’. TMS has been inundated with cakes since long-time commentator, the late Brian Johnston, once confessed a liking for this traditionally English confection. Periodically – the most recent time being at the end of November – the eLN has also indulged its members with cake. Ten years ago, Bob Browne and Rona Passmore cut the cake at the association’s tenth anniversary celebrations (at the Chartered Insurance Institute in London). This year, to mark the eLN’s 20th anniversary, the cake cutters were Pat Straughan, Adam Woods and Vaughan Waller, along with this blogger, in a ceremony held at the eLN’s ‘London headquarters’ in Belgrave Square.

 

Comment:  Although the computer based training/ e-learning industry is relatively new, it is notorious for relatively short lifespans among its constituent companies and organisations. Relatively few e-learning developer companies have survived the last 20 years – Epic and Echelon are, perhaps, examples while a good many others have not been so fortunate – and professional bodies have come, merged, gone and transformed into completely new bodies. In such a fluid industry, it’s nice to know that there are one or two pillars – such as the eLN – on which to build. Just as the British Empire and Commonwealth has been built on cricket – championed in these latter days by TMS – the UK’s e-learning industry has fed, and been nourished by, the eLN.

Megatron turns to e-learning

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About a decade or so ago, youngsters thrilled to a TV cartoon series called ‘Transformers’, in which the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, fought against the evil forces of the Decepticons, led by Megatron. The stories had a new lease of life earlier this year with the release of a ‘Transformers’ feature film.

 

Now comes ‘Personal Computing Tutor’ (PCT) (£24.99) – a CD-ROM-based e-learning programme which follows the ECDL syllabus – from Megatron Corporation Ltd.

 

Comment:  Unfortunately, there is no connection between Megatron the Transformer and the Megatron Corporation. Apparently, according to Megatron Corporation’s director, Amitabh Natekar, that was the name of the company when he and his colleagues bought it – and they haven’t thought to change it. But the thought of e-learning becoming a powerful weapon in the eternal fight between evil and good is appealing. It might even be quite near the truth sometimes…

The Leitch Report

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The story so far… The premise is that, without world class skills, UK businesses will find it increasingly difficult to innovate and compete. The Treasury tackled this problem by establishing the Leitch Review to identify the optimal skills mix to maximise economic growth by 2020. The resulting report published a set of targets for workforce learning levels and, in June this year, the former CBI chief and now the Government’s first ‘Skills Envoy’, Sir Digby Jones launched the controversial Skills Pledge promised by the Leitch Review.

 

This month sees The Public Sector Skills Conference, held at London’s QEII Conference Centre. The event has been prompted by the three-year deadline to improve the abilities of the entire public sector workforce. According to Sir Digby: “You’ve got three years to start training. If you don’t do it, do it. If you do do it, do it better.”

 

The Leitch Review notes that the average French worker (even when s/he is on strike?) produces 20 per cent more per hour than the average UK worker, the average German worker 13 per cent more and the average US worker 18 per cent more – although, to be fair, these figures are contested. And the UK’s Learning and Skills Council calculates that functional illiteracy and innumeracy costs the UK £10bn a year in lost revenue.

 

The challenge of developing world-class skill levels is becoming ever more difficult. China and India have vast numbers of highly educated workers and turn out 4m graduates a year, compared with the UK’s 250,000. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) stresses that, as emerging economies start to deliver high skills at moderate cost, the OECD countries must reform their skills policies. Supporting this, a recent study from the Economic and Social Research Centre (ESRC) has found that the proportion of UK jobs requiring NVQ level 4 and above has increased by ten per cent over the last 20 years. The proportion of jobs not requiring any qualifications fell by 11 per cent over the same period.

Comment: Some people believe that, for development to become a central part of UK business, we require a change of national culture toward learning with both a carrot and stick approach being adopted by Government. The Leitch Report seems to point the way – and a move towards mandatory continuous professional development (CPD) could be a positive step towards achieving this. The argument is:

 

  • To build world-class skills in the UK, employers need to encourage a ‘bottom-up pull’ from employees to continually learn, develop and adapt to a changing world.

 

  • This fosters greater employee responsibility for learning and development (L&D) and encourages a learning culture among the population as a whole.

 

  • Leadership, management skills and the interface between employee and line manager are crucial to fostering this culture.

 

  • Performance management and measurement are vital to forming the organisational bond between learning, skills, reward and business outcomes.

 

  • Organisations need the tools and approaches in place to link L&D strategies with those of the business and HR.

This sort of change would transform the importance of personal development but how likely is this to happen?

 

According to a CIPD fact sheet, ‘Training: A Short History’, UK government legislation on skills can be traced to the Statute of Artificers of 1563. This Statute gave way to a more ‘laissez-faire’ state approach to developing skills in the 19th century, with evolution of the craft trades unions introducing rigorous apprenticeship and membership models of training and recruitment. For some 450 years, there has been a continual ‘pendulum swing’ between voluntarism and state intervention. In all that time, we don’t seem to have learnt our lessons and ‘got it right’. Could that be because, as a nation, we don’t really care about skills levels? Maybe, on a personal level, we’re really concentrating on getting an income and maintaining a lifestyle – a strategy in which acquiring skills is a by-product, not an end in itself.

And another thing…

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The most recent Government legislation on skills – in the spirit of the 1563 Statute of Artificers – was the Industrial Training Act of 1964. It was employers’ adverse reactions to the application of this Act over the next 25 years or so that has brought the UK to the position where we needed a Leitch Report.

 

Unfortunately, the Leitch Report and this whole debate misses the point. The Report is an attempt by the middle class to make the working class do what the middle class thinks is a good idea (learn and ‘improve themselves’) in order for the middle class (quae ‘UK plc’) to earn more profits, dividends and so on. It’s a great idea and, as a member of the middle class, I applaud these efforts but there has to be some benefit in this whole rigmarole for the working class (and ‘self improvement as its own reward’ does not cut the mustard any more – if it ever did).

 

As has been said by others, a drive for world class skills in the UK means that ‘employers need to help catalyse a bottom-up pull from employees to continually learn, develop and adapt to a changing world…’

 

Surely the key point is that employers cannot remain merely catalysts in this formula – although experience shows that this is their preferred option. Unless employers are prepared to change as part of this process too – perhaps redressing the synergy between ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ that was separated in the late 1970s and hasn’t been reunited yet – employees are merely going to regard any initiative as ‘management imposed’ and won’t co-operate wholeheartedly. Consequently, as with every Government-inspired skills initiative in this country since 1563, the process is bound to fail.