Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
MONDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2004
MR MARTYN
SLOMAN AND
MS VICTORIA
GILL
Q180 Mr Pollard: I was very encouraged,
Martyn, when you mentioned that factory, which I thought was a
cracking example of good practice and clearly it works. We cannot
compete with developing countries, and nor should we try, we should
follow that model, so I am pleased about it. As the Chairman said,
recently we were in California and the Chamber of Commerce there
told us that what they wanted from their employees was the basic
skills, the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic, and that
they would add any other skills that were required themselves
and that there was a shortage there. Would you agree with that?
Mr Sloman: Yes, I think would
be the short answer. What employers want is people entering the
workforce with the basic skills, and general intelligence, whether
we like it or not, is a key factor for success in any job whatsoever.
Whatever you are looking at, that is a fair correlation. The other
side, of course, is that employers therefore have got to commit
at an early stage to developing their staff through, and again
we come back to this, increasing numbers are getting the messages
but not everybody is getting the messages at present. Those employers,
incidentally, who are not getting the messages and are not prepared
to invest in the skills of their staff and develop their staff,
are precisely the ones who are grumbling, quite often, about the
level of basic entry staff, so recruitment difficulties, but I
do feel that it is improving.
Q181 Mr Pollard: Thank you for that.
Moving on, I have some experience of care home operation and that
is an industry whose employees are lowly paid, generally, and
it is at the bottom end of the skills agenda. We are trying generally
to up-skill and we are having some real difficulty with that.
Many of the employees there will say "I know how to make
beds, I can do the washing-machine, I can do all the other bits
and pieces, what will I need?" Whilst I thought discretionary
training was a good idea, it does not seem to be working. How
can we get them to aspire to that?
Mr Sloman: That can be frustrating,
although, again, I think we are making progress. I came up originally
through the Coal Board and, even at the highest levels, the assumption
was, if you needed to know anything the Coal Board would train
you, but I think things have moved on quite a bit. The important
thing, I think, is to make the offer, and this is where the skills
of a profession come in, to make that learning offer, that training
offer, of a high quality and as accessible as possible and in
terms that the learner can understand, so that their first experience
is as positive as possible and to make more general opportunities
available. Another case study is Glasgow City Council Housing
Services, and what they have done on the European Computer Driving
Licence. These are dealing with caretakers, out in the various
estates, they call them concie"rges but they are caretakers,
out in the various council estates in Glasgow. They need those
people increasingly to communicate with the centre via the PC,
so they have offered everybody the opportunity to participate
in the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), and they have
brought in a coaching scheme so that they can have individual
IT coaches, and that again has been very, very successful. I do
not know who is running the HR function in your care home. I hope
he, or she, is a member of the CIPD, and, if so, we would be delighted
to get in touch with them and tell them about best practice. I
will leave my card.
Q182 Chairman: We do not often get
commercials from witnesses.
Mr Sloman: I am sorry.
Q183 Mr Gibb: Mr Sloman, you have
said that those employers who do not develop their staff tend
to be the ones who are most vocal in their complaint about the
basic skills on entry. I wonder if you would expand a bit more
on that. What is the view of the Institute about the basic skills
levels of employees generally that your personnel managers are
interviewing?
Mr Sloman: Vicky, do you want
to pick up that one?
Ms Gill: We have surveyed our
members, as do lots of organisations, and come up with various
statistics as to what people want from their employees. Certainly
there is a difficulty in recruiting people. Our survey last year
showed that, I think, 93% of those who were advertising vacancies
were having difficulty recruiting for them. Interestingly though
the top skill, or however you want to phrase it, that they were
lacking was technical expertise rather than basic skills deficiencies,
but that is not to say that there is not a basic skills problem.
Things like some of the softer skills which are often alluded
to, so the communication skills, came much lower down actually
in what they were suffering difficulties in recruiting, but certainly
there is growing evidence. In a previous job I worked on the Moser
Report, and the evidence is still there that basic skills problems
are very high in this country. I think employers are starting
to wake up to the fact that they have a responsibility to bear
on this as well. As Martyn said earlier, there is an expectation
that people come out of the education system with the appropriate
and suitable basic skills, but employers are growing to realise
that if then they enter the workforce and they have not got them
then it is largely up to them as well to contribute to this and
move them forward. We are very supportive of things like the employer
training pilot and the skills for life programmes which have gone
on. The difficulty is that, as with a lot of initiatives, they
tend to have reached out to and worked with those people, those
trainers, those organisations, who are already pretty positive
about training. I was reading through the stats about the
employer training pilot. Those that were participating, I think
there was quite a high statistic that they were people who had
a training plan already, which is great, and if those employees
are getting more training then that is a very positive thing.
It remains that segment of the market, that segment of organisations
which are not training at all, which we need to keep targeting
and need to keep pulling in.
Mr Sloman: I think this is always
a difficulty with any, what might be called, exhortative voluntarism,
i.e. it is voluntary but you are trying to persuade people to
participate, because you are never going to get at the people
you really want to get at. They are just not the people who are
going to be present at those launches of schemes or will attend
a meeting to talk about the new opportunities, and that sort of
thing.
Q184 Mr Gibb: Is it not a cost for
the small- and medium-sized enterprises to have to engage in this
sort of training, particularly in these soft skills or the basic
skills?
Mr Sloman: Yes. Undoubtedly, training
cannot take place without a cost. I think that the big shift over
the last years has been a move away from cash cost to consider
time, so time is the scarce resource in organisations, "Can
we release someone for half a day, a day or two days?" Undoubtedly
it does cause problems, the smaller the organisation the more
difficult it is to release people to participate in any sort of
training or learning activity.
Q185 Mr Gibb: Who should do that?
The small companies who cannot afford a training manager, who
do not have the economies of scale, who should be providing that
training to the smaller organisations?
Mr Sloman: At the end of the day,
it has to be the organisations themselves making that commitment,
it cannot be done by an outside party. We can make it easy for
them but, at the end of the day, they have got to commit.
Ms Gill: All I can say is that
there is a growing body of evidence that "on the job"
training is increasingly popular in small firms, partly because
it sells that argument, to a certain extent, of releasing people
to be away from the workplace.
Q186 Chairman: Are we not dwelling
here on pretty low-level skills? Surely, what Britain needs, more
than anything, is that higher level, people who are going to be
the technicians, that are working in our health services, they
are going to be highly-skilled technicians working in engineering,
it is this much higher level of skills that we are missing out
on? These are not people you are going to take at 16 and turn
them into highly-qualified people with technical skills in three
days or three months?
Mr Sloman: I think what we would
say is, if there is one area that really is important, in terms
of the skills gap, it is the front-line managers' ability to have
those interpersonal skills to manage and develop and coach their
staff, and coaching is the word which enters the vocabulary more
than anything else. It is the ability to work with people and
get the best out of them in that situation and to encourage them
to do their own learning, actually to develop themselves in that
organisation. That, I think, is the most important single area
and that is something which is eminently trainable, people can
learn feedback skills, they can learn the skills in giving clear
instructions, in setting objectives, indeed listening skills,
all those things are trainable. That, I think, is the single area
which is going to make this model of a committed workforce, of
high-performance working, discretionary behaviour, whatever terms
you want to use, it is at that level it is going to work.
Q187 Chairman: Let us get this right,
Martyn. The energiser in this process is what Michael Porter calls the
middle management, it is the middle management's competence that
really is the problem, not these people that we are getting in,
it is the middle management that knows how to energise and to
construct the programme round the person?
Mr Sloman: Yes, that is right,
and to support, engage, encourage, give feedback, all those sorts
of words. One of the first things I learned when I came into personnel
management was that people do not leave organisations, they leave
bosses, and it is your immediate boss who turns you off.
Q188 Mr Pollard: Chairman, I want
to explore the area of small businesses, which Nick Gibb was pursuing
earlier on. My experience of small businesses is that they can
be either single-person operations or small, family operations
with fewer than five employees, and it is almost impossible to
get somebody who is part of the widget-making bit to drop out
for even a short time, and you said it is down to the company
to try. Our SME sector is vital to our economy and I think we
are in danger of it falling behind again and again with the skills,
if we follow the model that you are suggesting?
Mr Sloman: I think my model needs
to be viewed in context. We said earlier that the small business
sector is quite a heterogeneous sector. Certainly, the small business
lawyers are updating themselves, they have got an obligation to
be updating, the small business, IT people, graphic designers,
those sorts of areas are always updating their skills, and, in
fact, in that sort of sector the suppliers are providing an enormous
amount of training. Cisco Systems is a huge trainer worldwide,
through their Global Academy, so you have got that sector. There
is an awful lot of informal coaching going on all the time of
transmitting best practice. I live in North Norfolk with the boat-building
industry. You are dead right, if you have got a five-man business
you do not release people for three weeks to go to Havant, or
wherever, but the transmission of those skills is evident and
is there, and that is something we can always improve upon.
Q189 Jonathan Shaw: The fact that
we have training programmes, grants available, do we create dependency
amongst some employers, with a lack of willingness to train, to
respond to the market, so they think "We'll blame the Government,
we'll blame someone"?
Mr Sloman: I do not think so.
I am sorry to keep repeating myself but we have got this huge
variance across sectors. I think an organisation which did it
properly would see their training and learning activities as being
so central to the business drivers that they would take an appropriate
judgment to manage it in a way which gave them that business advantage,
rather than, frankly, looking round to see what was available
and plugging into that.
Ms Gill: I would echo that really,
and that goes back to the statement I made earlier, of the engagement
with things like the employer training pilots, it tends to be
those organisations who are already active in that area.
Q190 Jonathan Shaw: Are we all throwing
money away then? Most of these employers, you are saying, have
their own system of training programmes, they will have spent
their own money on their employees in the way that you advocate,
but along we come and say, "Here, have some public money,"
for something they have spent their own money on already. Is that
a good use of taxpayers' money?
Ms Gill: There are particular
initiatives which are targeted at particular areas of the workforce.
Q191 Jonathan Shaw: I know about
the employer training pilots and I asked officials who came before
us, but they were not able to give us a percentage of the larger
companies, and it seemed that was the case rather than lots of
the small companies which my colleague, Mr Pollard, was talking
about. Is it a good idea or is it not a good idea, are we targeting
the wrong people?
Mr Sloman: Because of the expertise
that Vicky has, I would not speak in detail about the employer
training pilot. What I would say is, generally, I have seen plenty
of examples of very effective partnerships between private sector
employers, indeed public sector employers and government provision.
Coming back to my Ina Bearings example, the College of learndirect
came in and gave them a platform when, frankly, they just could
not have managed otherwise. I would not wish to generalise from
too much from these. I have seen good examples and bad.
Q192 Chairman: There was not a great
bureaucracy involved in the Ina Bearings story, was there?
Mr Sloman: No.
Q193 Chairman: Part of our job is
to scrutinise the spending of Government on particular projects,
and the biggest quango in this country in spend is the Learning
and Skills Council. Are you saying, the two of you, that really
you do not need this sort of state apparatus, that, given the
right environment, employers would get on with it themselves and
you do not need something like the Learning and Skills Council
to get in the way?
Mr Sloman: Certainly I would not
go that far. I would agree with your previous statement, that
our members are reporting that a lot of the systems are far too
complex, there are too many of them and they are not getting clear
signals as to what is available.
Ms Gill: That is really the overwhelming
picture which comes through.
Q194 Jonathan Shaw: Can they use
that as an excuse to blame, as I said about this dependency, "Oh,
we can't get hold of anything so we don't bother. I tried to make
one phone call once and no-one knew where I was going to go, so
I can't do any training"? It is not what I think, can we
explore this?
Ms Gill: Some will, some will
not. When you look at things like Investors in People, the general
response to that is very positive, and when it first started there
were criticisms of bureaucracy, of jumping through hoops, all
the usual things. They have been able to overcome that and it
has been seen increasingly as a very positive initiative and used
by a lot of organisations to look at the benefits of training
in line with their business plans. Where they do feel that something
meets a particular need and is appropriate to their situation
then they will adopt it and take it forward.
Q195 Jeff Ennis: We have not had
a discussion or a question yet on the role of trade union learning
representatives, which obviously is something very actively promoted
by the Government and I think it is a good initiative, personally.
How effective are trade union learning representatives in up-skilling
the workforce, shall we say?
Mr Sloman: Vicky has done a great
deal of work on this and will talk about our research on it, but
what I can say is, again, in many illustrations of best practice,
it has been the trade unions which have been solidly behind it.
I am sorry to keep coming back to this, but Ina Bearings is a
very, very specific example. They have moved away from adversarial
industrial relations to a recognition that they are all on board
in the up-skilling of the workers and it is in their members'
interests.
Ms Gill: The overwhelming response
we have had is that it has been a very positive initiative and,
as Martyn said, really it has improved relations a lot between
the traditional HR training department and the union. Where it
has worked best is where there has been a partnership arrangement
in place, where the HR, the training department, has been working
very closely with the union learning reps and they have been sharing
information and working in partnership together.
Q196 Jeff Ennis: Has there been a
perceived reluctance, at any sort of level of industry, in big
business or the SMEs, or in certain sectors within industry, to
promote the concept of a trade union learning representative?
Ms Gill: When first the idea was
put forward there was lots of discussion as to whether there would
be reluctance. I have not experienced any. As I said, the people
that I have spoken to have all spoken very positively about it
and there are some glowing case examples, so certainly not that
I have experienced.
Q197 Jeff Ennis: Is the positive
role of the trade union learning representative more successful
when you are dealing actually with basic skills, up-skilling or
higher skills, where they are there as well?
Ms Gill: It does tend to be, with
the basic skills and the lower skills. What is very interesting
about the union learning rep story is that the more people I speak
to the more you realise that actually those who have been involved
in programmes, who have been encouraged to go on programmes by
union learning reps, are the very people now who are becoming
union learning reps themselves and are promoting learning and
really have bought into the idea now of lifelong learning. Beforehand,
they were what I guess you would refer to as the reluctant learners.
Q198 Jeff Ennis: Going back to something
you said earlier, Martyn, that people need to take responsibility
for their own learning, which is another thing I agree with, given
that premise, how big a set-back to reducing the skills gap in
this country was the demise of the Individual Learning Accounts
initiative?
Mr Sloman: The Individual Learning
Accounts were an unfortunate experience because they came and
went, would be our view on that. There is plenty of literature
on this and I do not want to get involved in the arguments.
Q199 Chairman: We have produced a
lot of it.
Mr Sloman: Yes, you produced a
lot of them. Certainly I think that some way of incentivising
or recognising the commitment that an individual undertakes to
learn is a big and helpful thing within that model. Providing
you can get it to work without excessive bureaucratic controls
or, alternatively, scope for abuse, that is something which really
ought to be very positive indeed.
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