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Do employers have sufficient understanding of educational matters to play a useful role in training (or skills
development)?
Taiye Aro
City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development
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| New to the forum and interested in the debate on skills development especially in my country of origin, Nigeria. In fact, as part of my research into promoting vocational skills development training in Nigeria, I found the C & G Centre for Skills Development Website, hence my registering on this forum. Nigeria is desperate to redress the imbalance in skills development amongst the poor and underclass. There is a huge decline in skilled,semi-skilled and manual labour that should be providing efficiency and quality to the thriving construction, property and oil and gas industries in Nigeria. We need cooperation from social and political opinion formers and policy makers, key businesses and private investors, and multi-national corporations (e.g. Shell, Chevron, etc), to help invest in vocational training and skills development. Unemployment is rising at a very fast rate especially amongst the youths. Skills training and access to this is key to our socio-economic sustainability and well-being. How can the Centre help our cause as a potential partner
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Do employers have sufficient understanding of educational matters to play a useful role in training (or skills
development)?
This sort of question should be aimed at those people who grace the committees and regional groups of sector skills councils in England and Wales. From my own experience having spent some time on one of these groups, Employers play a somewhat subdued role, along with Unions, whilst Further Education managers have the buzz words/talk to direct things their way. Knowledge is distrubuted unfairly in our society and often those from vocational backgrounds do not have the skills or inclination to debate on policy or other structural issues. There are also political factors at work on these groups that are supposed to represent social partnerships, but in reality they are only a diluted version of those of our European partners.
On the other hand, because our system of skills development is supposed to be 'employer led' it should be asked whether understanding of educational matters is actually necessary at all - if skills development is employer driven, then they are supposed to say what they want and education and training is supposed to fit that remit. But the whole issue of employer led skills development can be taken with a pinch of salt as in my experience, many employers do not know what they want in terms of training - they just want a large pool of highly skilled staff to chose from, that are willing to work for low wages in poor conditions of employment!
The powerful position that these sector skills councils hold, may be the reason why employers do not have the opportunity to engage with skills development in a democratic way. Many of these sector skills councils are 'invitation only', so those employers that do have wide knowledge of education and training could be seen as a threat and not invited or even worse 'excluded'. Ewert Keep (cited in Uwin, 2009 professorial lecture at IOE) suggests that this sort of controlling position by government is a factor in the way employers take a passive role, which means the government have to do more and more.
We have a difficult situation in England regarding vocational learning and skills development - this situation is not helped by deregulation, lack of licences to practice, the fragmentation of organised labour, the decline of unions, the depoliticisation of the working class and the way that vocational learning is represented and reproduced by academics and sector skills councils. There are too many contradictions and paradoxes such as apprenticeships without regulated work forces - why spend 4 years learning plumbing when anyone can just set up as a plumber and do a six week course or less. Quality is not being monitored; we just sell, sell, sell, and hope the market will correct itself.
If the free market says a plumber can operate a business without the need for any formal qualifications or experience - what does it matter what apprentices learn in college! Or what employers have to contribute about qualifications for that matter!
We can see from this, that Unwin's (2009) comments on Apprenticeships being more about 'social inclusion' or serving as an instrument in keeping people off the dole, than serving as 'a holistic workforce development strategy linked to organisational goals'. Which leaves questions to be asked about quality skills provision - the lot we have at the moment will teach unemployed school leavers a few propositional facts that will be forgotten soon after, but it may not introduce them to the world of craft and social identity associated with doing something well for its own sake - the bits we real craftsmen/women want to contribute to vocational development can often be seen as 'inefficient' or not viable. We talk of things that cannot be measured or tested by multiple choice assessment - things like feelings, attitudes and tacit understandings that can only be learned in the social sphere of that particular activity. We have forgotten that skills exist beyond the college institution, exam bodies and sector skills councils, they are embedded within the fabric of our work culture - so its here that we should look to find out what is required - as an old Chicagoan said, 'by getting the seat of your pants dirty'.
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