Consultant’s Corner - February 2007

Leitch Report lays out the UK skills Challenge

The Leitch report challenges Employers to voluntarily ramp up training by 2010 or face regulations to enforce training to a minimum of Level 2 (five GCSEs, grade A-C).
Lord Leitch published his long-awaited Review of Skills last December. He had been commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Education and Skills “to examine the UK’s optimal skills mix in order to maximise economic growth, productivity and social justice”. The Chancellor also subsequently requested the Review to discuss how best to integrate employment and skills services.

How could this affect our approach? We asked one of our Senior Consultants to take an objective view.

The Leitch Review sets skills targets for the year 2020 with proposed interim review points. It is set out in seven chapters:
1) The central importance of skills, capabilities and expertise in a particular occupation or activity.
2) The UK’s historic skills deficit.
3) A national ambition for world class skills.
4) A demand-led skills system.
5) Employer engagement.
6) Embedding a culture of learning.
7) Integrating employment and skills services.

General comments on the report
In one sense the Review says little we’ve not read, heard or said before. For example, the Review identifies critical skills as including flexibility, leadership, management & innovation… just what Tom Peters and fellow management gurus were preaching back in the 1980s.

The Review does, however, succinctly qualify and quantify the implications of skills & management practice deficiencies for productivity, effectiveness and economic viability.

It also illustrates UK Government goals for training and learning in terms of social, financial and commercial benefits, whilst helping differentiate between formalised linear qualification/certification training and interventions focused on business impact.

The Leitch challenge is that the UK commits to becoming a world leader in skills by 2020, benchmarked against the upper quartile of the OECD. Stretching objectives for 2020 include:

• Some 95% of adults to achieve the basic skills of functional literacy and numeracy (an increase from 85% literacy and 79% numeracy in 2005)
• Exceeding 90% of adults qualified to at least Level 2 (an increase from 69% in 2005)
• Shifting the balance of intermediate skills from Level 2 to Level 3 (this means 1.9 million additional Level 3 attainments over the period and boosting the number of apprentices to 500,000 a year)
• Exceeding 40% of adults qualified to Level 4 and above (up from 29% in 2005

Thoughts on the implications of the Leitch Review

Many other commentators have discussed the content of the Leitch Review and the report itself is in the public domain, [place link here]. My interest lies in considering pragmatic issues (opportunities and risks) associated with how UK employers and training/learning suppliers can respond to Lord Sandy Leitch’s recommendations.

Budget allocations

Organisations have been spending a disproportionate amount of training budgets on their top people, and as a consequence, training suppliers focus on top-end services (high value – high margin). They must now shift to cascading increasingly high-level skills downwards through the organisation. To maintain profitability and manage costs training suppliers will increasingly exploit technology within their services.

The Report cites that India is making rapid progress in exploitation of technology for learning & assessments – the subcontinent is already home to some of the largest IT outsourcing and e-learning companies in the world. China is just starting to get into distributed learning and the IT giants (SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, CISCO etc.) have been driving through the use of technology for learning in emerging markets across the world.

By the time the low cost/high skill advantage in such countries begins to diminish, we anticipate that they will have developed innovations in learning ahead of the ‘developed world’. We really must think and act like these countries and retake the lead.

Semester based learning (via colleges, schools, universities and virtual academies), has failed to provide the flexibility and quality demanded for current initiatives and has failed to deliver skills in a timely manner for workplace needs. Funding through colleges is seen to be ponderous and inappropriate by client organisations and much of the content delivery, outmoded and irrelevant. Whilst the Government continues to pursue funding and delivery through colleges there will continue to be dissatisfaction.

Regulatory Compliance initiatives have created a significant backlog of training and assessment (hundreds of thousands of workers). Old ways of delivering these programmes cannot cope with the backlog nor with turnover in industries such as Security. If the rate of increase in both one-off and iterative compliance certifications continues to grow and at the same time a new Commission is created and the SSCs reformed, we have the potential for chaos.

Diagnostic tools for assessing potential employability amongst the population with low levels of English, literacy and/or numeracy, are essential to avoid creating a sub-culture of passive lockouts from future prosperity.

These will need to deploy adaptive technology and to offer scenario-based and simulation-based assessments.

Chaos and Confusion

I have concerns that the reformation of SSCs and creation of the new Commission may actually encourage a (temporary) slow down of activities, further reducing the chances of hitting current targets, let alone the new ones. I believe that the new Commission and represenative SSCs would benefit from closer liaison with market leaders in training provision, particularly in exploitation of technology.

Bringing people together via technology

I would expect to see greater innovation in the way organisations bring people together, such as one-two-one coaching (over the phone or VOIP), virtual seminar technology used for group coaching, team planning etc. This may include technologies such as the forthcoming Groove/SharePoint 2007 collaboration environment currently being integrated by Microsoft, or indeed the open source Moodle VLE.

learndirect

learndirect is the single biggest contributor to raising UK skill levels at the lower end (levels 1 and 2) via the delivery of vocational learning. learndirect also supply higher level courseware (e.g. level 3 - 4 ILM and CMI) for use in blended programmes and are well positioned in terms of content to respond to some of the higher-end leadership and management issues highlighted by Leitch.

Although the current learndirect learner registration process and LMS are unwieldy for organisations with significant numbers of learners, (having been designed for registering single learners and recording completions), they are one of a tiny handful of organisations with the expertise and experience to bring together education and training in a non-collegiate, non-semester service.

Leitch also specifically recommends that, in addition to delivering vocational learning, learndirect uses its brand to take over the provision of a new adult careers service, which would be added to its phone and web-based advisory service, currently called learndirect advice.

One of the greatest drawbacks of recent funded programmes has been the emphasis on “completions” via end-of-course examinations. This is symptomatic of centrally planned and imposed learning and ignores client needs for a ‘less is more’ philosophy. I would like to see the demand led approach recommended in the Review resulting in shorter, fit for the purpose and better targeted learning with embedded assessment and tracking for non-qualification or non-certification programmes.

We’ve already invented some great wheels. My involvement with some CPD programmes in UK-based professional institutions seems to indicate that UK members are far less committed or enthusiastic about CPD than their overseas counterparts. I’d go so far as to say that they under-deliver in terms of exploiting CPD to improve skills, service levels or performance. I witness a similar attitude with commentators who observe the overseas appetite for UK-driven qualifications and certifications, without considering (a) the competitive impact of other countries pursuing our own education and training paths more aggressively than we ourselves do, and (b) the merits of competing in learning as well as workplace activities. It’s time to reassess what we already possess in the UK and exploit such assets with a fresh drive and enthusiasm.

Exams, exams, exams. Annual or biennial iterative examinations in a number of industries (e.g. airline, nuclear, high-risk process and oil exploration), which are designed purely to test for retained knowledge in our estimation, do little to (a) raise skills, performance or standards, or (b) develop analytical or reasoning skills. They have no learning validity and furthermore, being mostly paper-based, carry high overheads and risk of error during marking. I would encourage the use of scenario or simulation based assessment which embed learning and which can also electronically communicate common problems to organisations, to enable them to deliver focused remedial interventions.

And finally, it does occur to me that, despite my personal enthusiasm for building mobile and informal learning elements into learning blends, formal learning will still be the major tool in improving skills in the UK, but we do need to become smarter and more creative in delivering the learning and its associated practice and assessment.

Leitch Report: Prosperity for all in the global economy - world class skills (PDF)
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Glynn Jung
Senior Associate Training Consultant

Epic Performance Improvement is focused on supporting the use of learning technologies by our clients by providing practical advice on all aspects of learning strategy, interactive design, blending, implementation and evaluation.
For an initial discussion on how we could help your organisation, please contact: consulting@epic.co.uk