Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 219)
MONDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2004
MR MARTYN
SLOMAN AND
MS VICTORIA
GILL
Q200 Jeff Ennis: Have you got anything
to add to that, Victoria?
Ms Gill: We were fairly supportive
of the Individual Learning Accounts. Certainly, when we were doing
our submissions to the Skills Strategy, etc, we did argue that
something similar should be in place, precisely for that point,
to put some of the emphasis and the onus on the individual and
give them that recognition for the work they are doing.
Chairman: Are not trade unions all the
same? Surely, some trade unions are not interested in education
and training at all, are they, some of them are absolutely Neanderthal,
some of the people, when you talk to them about training? Which
did you find were the good ones and which were the bad ones?
Jonathan Shaw: Name them, all?
Q201 Chairman: Give us an exemplar,
give us a trade union that really was doing the job?
Ms Gill: I will give you a good
example. UNISON have done amazing work.
Mr Sloman: To get Vicky off that
hook, being a Neanderthal is not a property of any particular
class or political persuasion. Having been a training manager
in an investment bank, I can assure you that the most difficult
problem was with the senior managers, right at the top, who would
visit our courses and say "I've never received any training
in my life and I don't know what you're here for, but I'm a far
better person for it." Then they would go and interview someone
in such a disastrous way that they would complain subsequently.
There is a serious point here, that the message has to be got
across that it is in everybody's interest for everybody to update
their skills on a continual basis in the modern workforce, and
that is how we are going to compete in the future.
Chairman: What you are describing really
is a successful partnership. On Individual Learning Accounts,
what we found, and certainly those of us on that inquiry, was
that USDAW, for example, was a phenomenally good union, it is
not one that I belong to so I feel that I can say this. We found
that USDAW, acting as the kind of partner intermediary with Individual
Learning Accounts, made it extremely successful, and, of course,
they were not prone to fraud where they had that intermediary.
Q202 Helen Jones: Can I take you
on to explore this notion of partnership further, because you
said quite rightly that training works best when everyone realises
there is a continuous need to update it. The difference between
many companies in this country and, say, in the situation we see
in Germany, or in Finland, is that there is much more of a shared
vision between employers and their trade unions about where a
company should be going, what are its needs and, therefore, how
they should get to their goals. Do you have any evidence for us
from this country about where that works well, about which companies
have adopted it and, consequently, do you have any feelings about
whether training is held back because there is not that sharing
of information, and hence sharing of goals, right at the beginning
of the process?
Ms Gill: I was going to pick up
again on the Bath research which I alluded to, and one of the
key things which came out of that, and this is not relating particularly
to trade unions but it is about having a vision for an organisation,
that was one of the key things which came out, was linking people
to performance. It was the organisations which had a very clear
goal, so the Nationwide, it was to be a mutual organisation, and
the one, clear goal was transmitted down through the workforce,
with unions, where they were in place, and that was a key factor
across the board in motivating the workforce.
Mr Sloman: It is all about getting
a successful spiral, and the vocabulary differs a little bit.
We all love our jargon and our jargon is about discretionary behaviour
or people performance or high-performance working. At the end
of the day, there is plenty of evidence now, statistical evidence
from the UK, we have just done a huge amount of work on this,
and from overseas, that you can identify best human resource practices,
and there is a list of those factors. The way that they work is,
if people have a commitment to the organisation so they are proud
to work for the organisation, and one of the best questions you
can ask in any survey is "Would you be happy if members of
your family joined the organisation?" or "Would you
recommend this to anyone else?" those sorts of questions
about commitment to the organisation. It is about their individual
motivation and whether they are given the scope within their job
to apply those skills, because it is no good having faulty job
design so that people have got the skills and feel very frustrated
that they cannot use them at all. That just creates a negative
atmosphere for themselves and other people. When that is right
and if line managers, it comes back to the successful middle managers,
are applying it correctly then you will get those sorts of commitment
and behaviour which lead to people taking the extra step to meet
the needs of the business. That is where the evidence is. A person
seeking to acquire the skills is a product of that, so actually
they will think "What do I need to do?" Also they will
share information with other people, so if they learn something
about the customers or the systems that they are using they will
think "Who else in the organisation, who else amongst my
colleagues, needs to know this?" It is possible, over time,
to build up those sorts of practices.
Q203 Helen Jones: You can have a
top-down vision, can you not, or you can have a vision of the
company's future which is worked out between employers and employees,
"We want to move from making product x, which we know will
be obsolete in a certain time, to product y and that is the reason
we want you to train"? What evidence can you give us about
the impact of that sort of look at a company's economic future
and its impact on training?
Mr Sloman: What our results demonstrate
is that a key vision is part of that model which drives through
the best HR practices, they lead to a higher commitment to training
and learning and they lead to business success. Obviously, it
is very sector-specific when you follow that through, but there
is enough general evidence to suggest that indeed is the case,
and we can prove that.
Q204 Chairman: Martyn, can I press
you a little on this, because it is all very interesting, but
is not the kind of model that you at the Institute are more involved
with a model that is of yesterday's companies, in the sense that
we used to have lots of very large employers, increasingly the
more sophisticated, developed economies are made up of many, many
small and medium enterprises? They are the difficult ones. You
do not have even the size of Ina or the ICIs, they are abnormal
now, are they not? What we have are myriads of small and medium
enterprises which present a totally different challenge to training
and skills needs, and are we not sort of talking about what was
appropriate for the 20th century rather than what is appropriate
for the 21st century?
Mr Sloman: I do not think so.
I think perhaps what we would preface all this with, which is
the modern movement, today's problem, today's issue, is this shift
from training to learning, so learning is an individual activity
in which people will participate away from training as a top-down
intervention. I would say also that, pretty much irrespective
of the size of the organisation and the sector, those basic principles
that people have to have, the ability, the motivation and the
opportunity, it is called the AMO model, those would apply absolutely
irrespective, so even in the smallest size of organisation, people
must have the ability, that motivation and that opportunity. I
think that is the way in which firms will compete in the future,
irrespective of size.
Q205 Chairman: It is a very individual
concept. Everything you are saying to us, in a sense, does seem
to shout at us, "Well, you don't need great state bureaucracies
to do that, do you?" You need to change the culture within
companies, you do not need state bureaucracies, perhaps they would
make it more difficult?
Mr Sloman: Certainly I think that
great state bureaucracies are not going to drive that model, that
much must be right, and it will come down to that individual commitment
and that investment over time and building up that trust and confidence
in the firm.
Chairman: We are moving on now to curriculum
and qualifications.
Q206 Mr Chaytor: Chairman, actually
that leads into my opening question. In this model, which depends
fundamentally on discretionary behaviour of individuals, what
is the role for the state, how would you characterise the responsibility
of Government in ensuring that this bottom-up, decentralised model
works?
Mr Sloman: I think that Government
has got a clear responsibility at the educational interface and
with people who have been out of the employment market to ensure
that they are in a good state to come back into that labour market.
I think that Government must be realistic, it must not oversell
or overhype any particular initiative. One of my particular subjects
is e-learning, for example, and I think that was considerably
overhyped at the beginning. There is no silver bullet and it does
take time. I think that Government has got a variety of roles,
in terms of sector planning and planning the economy and looking
at those shortages in the labour force.
Ms Gill: I think it is having
a general understanding of the principles. It is something which
I know the DTI in particular are wrangling with and trying to
get their head around, and they are talking about high-performance
working a lot more and trying to put it through when they are
talking about what they are doing in respect of innovation
and competitiveness, all those sorts of issues. I think it is
having it there more as an underlying principle than particular
initiatives to respond to any need.
Q207 Mr Chaytor: Really what you
are saying is, Government has a responsibility for the Education
Service, but in terms of training in the workplace Government
has just got to establish some basic principle?
Mr Sloman: I think so.
Q208 Mr Chaytor: What about qualifications,
the national qualifications structure, should this be decentralised
completely at a company level as well?
Mr Sloman: No. Let us be clear
what qualifications are, as far as the employers are concerned,
then I will let Vicky pick up the specifics on NVQs. To an employer,
qualifications are a link between the training market and the
labour market. What we are saying here is that what employers
need is individuals who are acquiring skills and capabilities
and can apply them and a qualification is, in some cases, a clear
indication that they have acquired those skills and capabilities.
Also, from the individual's point of view, they are useful because
they are a portable qualification, and fashions in qualifications
change. At one time, accountancy was the surrogate management
qualification, in this country, if you wanted to go into management
you became a qualified accountant. Then the MBA appeared suddenly.
A lot of qualifications have taken off very effectively. I mentioned
the ECDL, which seems to us to be one which has taken off in a
big way. I will risk another commercial, our own CIPD qualification.
We have gone from 70,000 members in 1995 to 120,000 now because
people who go into human resources see our qualification as valuable,
so they go two evenings to the local college to acquire it and
they develop skills. Unfortunately, not all qualifications can
achieve that credibility in the market, and I think that is how
we would see the problem with qualifications for employment.
Ms Gill: It is about fitting purpose,
is it not? In certain circumstances, the Modern Apprenticeships,
the NVQs, work very well, in others they are not considered appropriate,
and there have been pressures in the past to have an almost blanket
approach to "We will move everybody up to this qualifications
framework." I think there is a real danger at the moment,
because we are all talking an awful lot, and I am as guilty of
it, I am sure, as anybody else, of level one and level two and
level three, and, as Martyn and I find, when we go out and talk
to numerous employers, you say level two to somebody and they
are going to look at you quite blankly and probably point you
in the direction of the lift. We are talking a different language
to them, in a lot of circumstances.
Q209 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
qualifications which, Martyn, you mentioned, the MBA or the European
Computer Driving Licence, these are not the inventions of Government,
are they?
Mr Sloman: No.
Q210 Mr Chaytor: Are you saying that
the Government qualifications structure is utterly irrelevant
to what happens in the labour market for adults?
Mr Sloman: No. Certainly it is
not irrelevant. It cannot be irrelevant because that is what drives
a lot of aspiring people who want to move in the labour market
or improve themselves. One of the ways of doing it is actually
to achieve a qualification which demonstrates a commitment and
an acquisition of a set of skills or knowledge. Vicky is our expert
in this area but I feel that there is a danger in this total,
blanket approach. When you are trying to map qualifications across
the whole of the labour market, there is a worrying tendency to
create a static solution to what is essentially a dynamic problem.
If I can give you a nice little illustration, which is e-learning,
that is an area I follow very closely, none of us knows where
e-learning is going to go. We can guess, but nobody knows what
skills are going to be required to deliver successful e-learning
in five years' time. If you try to define now a rigid qualification
for someone specialising in e-learning, the chances are you will
guess the market incorrectly.
Q211 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask Vicky,
in view of your comments about employers' perception of level
twos and level threes, do you think there is no case for a national
qualifications structure? Is it just that the case has not been
made to employers or there is some gap between what Government
is wanting to do and what employers think is necessary or relevant?
Ms Gill: I think there is a case
for the structure. Like a lot of things, it goes back to the issue
of terminology, that we are talking two different languages, almost.
There are some excellent examples going on. I have spent quite
a lot of time with Selfridges recently and they have been working
with their new Sector Skills Council to establish what is essentially
a Level Three, junior manager qualification, which is going to
be part of the national qualification framework, I believe, maybe
an NVQ. It works because it has been done with a number of other
retailers and it builds in the in-house induction training they
are doing already, so immediately it has a core relevance to them
and their business. That is the key to it all really, it is the
partnership working, and that is where you see the success stories,
where they are, in Foundation Degrees and in Modern Apprenticeships,
where it is meeting a very particular need which the employer
has identified.
Q212 Mr Chaytor: One of the Government's
initiatives to raise the status of the vocational dimension and
the skills dimension to the school system and the further education
system is the attempt to reform the 14-19 curriculum, and you
will know we have the working party which has produced its interim
report, arguing for this diploma at the age of 19. The CBI has
immediately come out against this reform, as has the Headmasters'
Conference, and they seem to be the only two organisations which
have come out against it. Is it not strange that the CBI is sticking
by A-levels and GCSEs as the only qualifications they seem to
value and is turning its face against the attempt to give parity
and esteem to the new vocational qualifications? What is the Institute's
view of the 14-19 reforms?
Ms Gill: Obviously, I cannot speak
for the CBI, but I am guessing, from reading the material that
they have put out, sort of support material for their statement.
I think what they are saying is let us not get lost, let us not
forget that the key issue is ensuring that people leave school
with appropriate skills, let us not get that lost with a big debate
around whether it should be a diploma or GCSEs or A-levels. From
our point of view, our experience is primarily in workforce development,
so although our members necessarily have a view I would not say
that there is a cohesive view as to what they feel we should do
with 14-19 education. I think the general concern is that whatever
is brought in is done in a thorough and appropriate manner and
is given appropriate funding, time, etc, to bed in, and that they
feel has relevance to them. If there is going to be a new stream
of vocational qualifications or a new scheme of more workforce
involvement then I guess they want a seat at the table and an
assurance that they will get their voice heard.
Q213 Chairman: One of the concerns
that some of us had when we looked at the American model was that
their high schools seemed to be going through something of a crisis,
and just by attendance that people seemed to get at 18 a high
school diploma for the entirety of their effort, which does not
actually pinpoint real performance in particular subjects. Compare
that with GCSE and A-level. Would it not concern your members
if we had a kind of more general 18 qualification, or do you think
it is a good thing that you have that?
Mr Sloman: As Vicky says, we are
tentative, we do not pronounce on the 14-19, we pronounce on workforce
issues. What concerns our members is the general level of skills
of school-leavers coming in, and you have had Alison Wolf's evidence
previously, and we have read that, and I do not think we depart
very much from that. She has picked up the main points, the mathematical
skills, for example, the comprehension skills, and that sort of
thing. Also, I think our members need to be able to read what
is coming on, so they need transparency in the system, and it
can be quite difficult if they are confused by continual changes
which have not had time to become embedded. That is what they
are looking for, the basic levels of skills and that they can
understand them. They are recruiting a lot, they have a lot of
experience. We are not trying to be SMEs now for whom a recruitment
decision is a one-off, but most employers are pretty sophisticated
in their recruitment, so they can read.
Q214 Chairman: Are you being one
dimensional, as an Institute, then Martyn, that really what you
are telling us is what the private sector wants? There is a massive
world out there, of the public sector, of the health area, local
government, so much public sector education and skills, and you
would not have an opinion on any of that?
Mr Sloman: No. I am sorry, there
is a misunderstanding here. I am talking right the way across
sectors, I am talking about private, public and voluntary sectors.
What I am saying is that, as an Institute, our statements and
our interests are in the workforce, so it is organisation in the
workforce.
Q215 Chairman: Public and private?
Mr Sloman: Public and private
and voluntary, yes, we have a very, very high proportion. All
I was saying, Chair, was that we do not, as a rule, issue policy
statements or respond much on things which are in the education
system, as such, so we do not look at the 19-year-olds.
Q216 Valerie Davey: Can I move on
to the workforce qualifications and who ought to be paying for
them. I can remember a time in Bristol when Rolls-Royce had its
own college. Finances took a dip and the local FE college took
on that training, and you could see that influence in the way
it happened. Therefore, who should be paying? It is just a historic
fact that in some areas of work it has always been the employer,
in other areas it has always been the state, and is that okay
for the future?
Mr Sloman: Employers generally
will have a positive attitude, and again we have surveyed this,
towards people pursuing relevant qualifications through the education
system. There might be a requirement that if they leave the organisation
afterwards they will pay back some of the money towards that.
I think you are right in your central premise, which is there
are certain old jobs, as it were, which were always seen as part
of the education system, and similar jobs in the new economy are
not seen as something that the education system delivers, initially,
and I think you are highlighting an anomaly there. I think, generally,
employers will bear the costs of what they consider to be relevant
training in order to equip the workforce.
Q217 Valerie Davey: The individuals,
by comparison, want a transferable, recognised qualification,
do they not, so in a way they are pulling in different directions.
Interestingly enough, when we went to San Diego recently, we were
told about the skills which Microsoft were demanding and the huge
input which a college there was making to skills which were absolutely
specific to that company. When I asked them "Surely, that
is quite selfish, that's exactly what they need?" I was told,
"Oh, no, this qualification is such that because of the nature
of the company it can, of course, be taken anywhere." You
see almost a full circle coming through. Are companies in this
country more concerned about the cost, if it is a transferable
skill, because then they are going to lose their employee to another
company, they are paying the training costs for another company?
Mr Sloman: I think economists
looking at training have always tried to differentiate between
company-specific skills and transferable skills. The point you
are making, which I think is a very valid one, is that the number
of transferable skills is increasing, so those transferable IT
skills, which would have been very company-specific and regarded
as technical skills within the company, have crossed that boundary
to transferable skills. In my evidence, I do not see employers
actually looking at it in those terms. I have never known a training
department look at and treat differently those skills which were
transferable outside and those which were inside, with the exception
of long-term, portable qualifications, sponsoring people for the
MBA, or indeed sponsoring people for the CIPD qualification, where
they would want a payback, in many cases, if people left. I do
not think they think in those ways, they think in terms of "What
are the skills that people need to do their job better?"
Ms Gill: I agree. We have talked
a lot about employers thinking about business performance, competitive
advantage, all those kinds of things, but also they are looking
a lot at individual performance, a lot of training will go down
to the individual and they will look at what that individual needs.
I agree with Martyn really that they do not view it particularly
in that way. To a certain extent, they are looking at the bigger
picture of what they want to achieve.
Q218 Valerie Davey: That is interesting.
Are they looking at the bigger picture as perhaps the state ought
to be? Barry mentioned that we looked at teacher retention and
this country is skilling huge numbers of people who stay in teaching,
let us say, for about seven years and then move on, and I am not
sure whether the state gets value for money out of that or not,
in the way in which those skills are transferred. Some of us who
are sitting here are former teachers, so I am not sure whether
the Government is so pleased occasionally. Are you saying that
some of these big companies are saying actually, "Okay, we
are skilling the UK plc workforce," or not?
Ms Gill: They will still look
at their own business objectives and what people are doing. I
guess what we are saying is they are not perhaps overly paranoid
about where the people are going to go afterwards. Yes, they want
to keep them, and training and development are seen as key recruitment
and retention tools. That is the really important point to make
there, which is so often used as a way of keeping people within
the organisation rather than worrying that if you train them they
are going to go elsewhere.
Mr Sloman: Indeed, it is very
sector-specific, if I might add. Your school-teacher example.
I worked for Ernst & Young. I was Director of Management Training
at Ernst & Young, which is a big accountancy firm. A model
there was a recognition that a lot of people would leave after
they had qualified as an accountant, that was the time when they
would leave, if they chose, or felt that they were not going on
to achieve partnership. That was the deal, that was the sort of,
the phrase is, psychological contract, but that was the clear
understanding on which people came. A lot of management consultancies,
IT firms, knowledge-intensive firms, do not expect to hold their
people but what they do want is that those people get a very good
deal in terms of their own personal skills development.
Q219 Chairman: Should we not be identifying
these kinds of lead players then in education and training? Something
which you will know more about than most people in this room will
be the BBC. The BBC were always seen as the great trainers of
people in the media, whereas the so-called independent, commercial,
did not train at all, they just lived off the training of the
BBC. I am just trying to draw out of you how we move on in our
report. Do we say in each sector there should be a lead player,
they should be identified, encouraged and perhaps rewarded? Rather
than paying this large bureaucracy, you just subsidise some really
fine trainers?
Mr Sloman: There are several questions
there, Chair. What would scare me to death is if you went out
and sought really successful organisations and put them up as
models for everyone else. Goodness knows how many Enron case studies
we had written in the management literature over the last couple
of years. That seems to be the kiss of death. What I would urge
the Committee to consider is that there is a lot of best practice
out there, there is a lot of very, very good practice in all sorts
of industries, in all sorts of circumstances, and that ought to
be recognised as such and any initiatives ought to recognise there
is a lot of good stuff as well as bad stuff going on. The real
problem we have got in this country is that the bad exists alongside
the very good, and the bad are not listening. There is precious
little incentive, other than the ultimate threat of business collapse,
which does come and does happen, to get the non-investors in people
actually to listen to us and I think that is the problem we have
all got. I am not offering much of a solution, but I think we
are only going to go forward together if we recognise that as
the nature of the problem.
Ms Gill: I would just pick up
on the BBC example, to a certain extent, and it is where I guess
the Sector Skills Council remit should be, this is what they have
been tasked to do. I think, if I were to give any one recommendation
to the Committee, it would be (a) to give them time to do what
actually they need to do, and (b) to give them the space to be
a true employer voice, rather than what they are expected to do
being dictated to in some way by any number of government departments.
The survey that we have just done shows that where employers go
for guidance and training development on different issues, aside
from CIPD, obviously, is employer networks. If we are trying to
set up Sector Skills Councils in that kind of remit they must
really believe and the employers that participate in them must
really believe that they are putting forward an employer force
and their needs are being heard, rather than the agenda being
dictated by the DfES, the DTI, or any other agency.
Chairman: We are going to move on to
our last section, which is Government initiatives and they have
been running through our debate.
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