Learning and business must get connected

THERE ARE a thousand challenges facing 21st-century Scotland. The rapidly changing economic environment, a meteoric pace of technological advance, an ageing population and the increasingly global nature of enterprise and competition - these are are the obstacles the nation must overcome if it is to prosper and progress.

One thing is clear: if we are to meet the demands of a turbulent global marketplace, every single Scot is going to have to be equipped with the requisite skills, and as things stand this simply isn't the case. Every week, we read reports from employers bemoaning the insufficiency of trained staff, and the clamour to address this critical factor is growing by the day.

Recognising that the current skills gap is unsustainable, earlier this month the Scottish government published Skills For Scotland: A Lifelong Skills Strategy. A declaration of intent, the document lays out how the SNP administration plans to draw together the disparate components of the country's employment, education and examination systems to create an economic blueprint designed to met the needs of individuals, employers and the economy as a whole.
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"The government's lifelong skills strategy lays out how all the constituent parts of our skills, employability, education and learning systems can contribute to work together as one lifelong learning system, to building Scotland a skills base that is genuinely world class," said Fiona Hyslop MSP, Cabinet secretary for education and lifelong learning.

"Smarter Scots are at the heart of everything we want to achieve for this country. I want to work with business to put our ambitious plans into action and make our vision for a smarter Scotland a reality," she added.

Last week saw the beginning of that process. Speaking at a meeting hosted by Microsoft and the Sunday Herald, the Cabinet secretary sat down to breakfast with a panel comprising of some of the most senior figures in the Scottish economy in order to hear their reaction to the administration's plans. What followed was a lively and often impassioned debate, but she must have been heartened by the broad agreement with which the strategy was met.

"We very much welcome the document. We like its analysis of the critical areas to be addressed, recognising the need for improving numeracy and other key skills and also the key need for heavier employer involvement in the education and training agenda," said Iain McMillan, director of CBI Scotland.

"We need to take this forward. The strategy is great, but making it happen is the real challenge, and the government has our full support for that. "

Nobody around the table disagreed. Fine-tuning Scotland's education agenda will undoubtedly provoke many disputes as the debate rolls on, but a clear consensus exists to the effect that changes must be made. Presenting Microsoft's broadly welcoming reaction to the skills strategy, education relations manager Stephen Uden stated that Scotland is well placed to compete in the digital information economy - which will account for 50% of the total economy by 2010 - but he sketched out a number of issues to be confronted.

"Scotland is well positioned to take advantage, but only provided it can make a meaningful connection between skills and the economy. The UK currently lags behind the rest of the world in terms of productivity and about half of all productivity improvements come from use of IT, but many people are excluded socially and economically by lack of access to technology and we don't always get nimbleness when engaging the public sector to address such issues, " he said.

"There are many problems facing businesses when it comes to engaging higher education and there needs to be a better system for enabling this. There are also problems about how to recognise the soft' communication skills that are so important today and how to engage employers in creating the skills capacity industry requires."

While the government's strategy document covers such issues, it has been criticised in parliament for failing to set firm targets on how and when each problem will be addressed. What quickly became clear from the meeting, however, was that few of the attendees considered such an inclusion necessary, focusing instead upon what many saw as a fundamental disconnection between public and private sectors.

"The connection between agencies has disappointed me greatly," said Willie Haughey, head of Careers Scotland and founder of City Refrigeration. "We recently had 34 job opportunities on our books and when I asked about communications from the job centre I was told that we'd had none at all. There are clearly fundamental problems and I think it's a good thing there are no targets - in my experience they are there to be distorted.

"There is no connectivity between actual opportunities and the skills gap. We're training people for jobs that don't exist, and need to deal with that urgently. If there has to be a target for the government it is this: if you can work hard to guarantee a one-stop shop to connect skills to the business agenda, then we can make a big difference by working together."

An argument that set heads nodding around the table, Haughey's analysis appeared to be right on the money. None of those present expressed confidence in the current set-up, describing a bewildering multiplicity of employment agencies and skills sector councils so labyrinthine that navigating it has become almost impossible.

John McElwee of Marks & Spencer said: "We need a consistent approach from the agencies. In my experience, some of the job centres work, others are not so good. We need to make them all work uniformly and to take a long hard look at the number of agencies and the services they provide. Any employer looking for certain skills will find that there are over 300 in the Glasgow area alone, and that's just confusing."

The administration's decision to merge Learndirect Scotland with Careers Scotland was welcomed by the meeting as a step in the right direction towards unravelling the public sector's tangled web of training and skills-related agencies.

The clear message remained, however, that there is still much work to do, with representatives of both merging organisations concurring with the business lobby's belief that the shortfall in vocational skills is reaching worrying proportions.

"There are skills shortages in all areas - even computer programmers - and the further education sector needs to be more engaged with employers if we're going to address this. At the moment they don't seem to have the incentive, and there is a fundamental need to change that view," said Scottish Engineering's Susan Andrews.

"What is the point of pandering to current fashions and offering courses in forensic science when there is only a handful of available jobs, then ignoring the growing need for engineers? We should be doing more to show what a great qualification the modern apprenticeship can be and less to discourage young people from taking a vocational route."

Taking up this theme and running with it, Scottish Chambers of Commerce economist Neil MacCallum called for a strategic review of the entire higher education sector. Arguing for a need to conduct a longitudinal analysis of the education sector and its performance in meeting the needs of the economy, he echoed the importance of addressing the current imbalance between academic and vocational training.

"Most of our members do not understand why we have so many organisations and hurdles between them and the skills agenda. We need to connect the two sectors so that they communicate and collaborate effectively. There is no doubt that this process has stalled, and to get it moving again we need a frank discussion about where education fits into economic strategy, to consider carefully whether we have too many universities duplicating services and to find ways of promoting parity of esteem between academic and vocational qualifications," he said.

As part of that process, the meeting broadly agreed that there is a need to create a more flexible qualifications structure which can both be adapted to take account of emerging needs for new skills and also to recognise the knowledge and skills acquired from on the job experience.

Pointing to CBI Scotland statistics indicating that employers already spend an estimated £1.8 billion a year on training staff, many of those present believed that not only should such experience be formally recognised, but that methods should also be sought in order to actively encourage companies to aid their staff's development.

Learndirect Scotland board member Bill Stevely said: "There is general recognition that Scotland is unique in Europe for having a system that allows people to access training and qualifications throughout their lifetimes, and businesses need to recognise this and use it more.

"We are doing some great work with individuals and large companies tend to recognise the need for training, but we are not doing so well at motivating small employers to take part."

While not disputing the amount spent on training every year, the STUC's Grahame Smith pointed out that 60% of Scots work for employers that conduct none at all. Although positive about the government's commitment to improving qualifications access to the existing workforce, he noted disappointment over the administration's lack of enthusiasm for imposing a training levy on all employers, expressing some scepticism over the workability of a voluntary scheme.

Had time or opportunity existed, the debate could have continued for many hours. Ranging from the complexities facing companies trying to find qualified staff or retrain existing employees to the need to persuade parents that not every child must graduate with an academic degree, it proved a far-reaching conversation which served to illustrate the complexity and scale of the challenge the Scottish government has set itself in attempting to overhaul the entire skills sector.

There will doubtless be bumpy times ahead and there will certainly be much more talk before anything can truly be said to have been achieved. Noting the complexity of challenge ahead, Hyslop nonetheless expressed her conviction that in starting the debate, a major step into the future has been taken.

"My mission is to bring all of these issues together. The announcement that we are to merge two of the major skills agencies was part of it and there will be more to come as we attempt to build a simpler framework that is easier to navigate and more responsive to change," she said.

"There are disconnections, but this is what we are working to change. Employer engagement in the process will be vital, but if we continue to work together I think we can deliver, enabling people to make active, aspirational choices in life and to open up a world of work to thousands of Scots."

Attendees: Fiona Hyslop MSP (Cabinet secretary for education and lifelong learning), Stephen Uden (Microsoft), Neil MacCallum (Scottish Chambers of Commerce), Susan Andrews (Scottish Engineering), Grahame Smith (STUC), Graham Johnstone (Velux), John McElwee (Marks and Spencer), Iain McMillan (CBI Scotland), Willie Haughey (Careers Scotland), Bill Stevely (LearnDirect Scotland) & John McCormick (Scottish Qualifications Authority).

This article was first published in The Sunday Herald