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Workshop A
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop A - Session 1 - Questions and Contributions
Chair: In the team there are different perspectives. You have me trying to shed a little light on the challenges facing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe beyond the EU. You have an EU perspective with a focus on guidance and counselling from Marc Ant. You have an Italian perspective and then a very specific Danish-led project in a specific field of brokering between small firms and training providers.
Q (Richard Vinless, Bolton and Bury Training Enterprise Council in Greater Manchester): I want to ask a very simple question because it has intrigued me since yesterday. The job rotation system in Denmark, does it lead to real jobs in the end or do people go round the rotation and end up unemployed where they started from?
Soren Ehlers:
Q: Considering the brokers, how are those people perceived by SMEs? Are they easily accepted? Will it be possible to play that role of intermediary between the company and the training institution? Other questions on the same theme again, what is the status which has been foreseen for these people? Is it going to be public or private and who is going to finance their intervention?
Q: This question is also related with the role of the broker. I think it is very interesting. I think also that really what we need to address is how to negotiate. The communication role is very important. It could be that the employee, the employer and the broker get together to identify the needs for training and education. Also concerning job rotation, I think it is a wonderful example for partnership. I think this model gives us a very good example of involvement of all the partners and an opportunity anyway for lifelong learning for unemployed people.
Soren Ehlers: In much of our thinking about adult learning, the philosophy is the education of children. In many ways the systems do not accept that it is adults, with lots of lifelong learning experience, who have learned a lot of things during their lives. We are born as copies. We look like each other when we are children and, as we grow up, the older we get the more differentiated we will get. This leads to me to the thinking that each kind of professional learning experience must be planned so that it can fulfil that individual. If we are going to do that we should negotiate with each individual; and if you ask the people coming from the company to negotiate with the learners, then you might succeed. If you ask the people coming from the trade union to negotiate with the learners about their needs, you have a better chance of negotiating with them. But it would be even better if the person who is going to find out what the learning needs are, comes as a neutral person, as an expert paid by the enterprise. Of course, the enterprise must accept this broker, this negotiator, this tailor. The problem is very often that we cannot find persons who are able to fulfil all these functions, and that is why I place so much stress on the training of these brokers. For the last two years we have called the brokers 'programme managers'. A colleague from Virginia told me that in Virginia they were planning a system by which the brokers would be paid with a percentage of a certain number of successes during such a course. The learners could have a learning contract with the providers and the broker could have another kind of contract with the learners, so that his payment would be a percentage of their resource. I think that is my first answer. For the question about how were the brokers received by the SMEs. You could not do it without the acceptance of the enterprise so there would be nothing going on if they are not accepted. Maybe one of the first points would be that the broker must be accepted.
Marc Ant: Concerning the idea of brokerage, there are quite a few models being developed right now in the framework of the LEONARDO Programme. They situate themselves on the edge between two systems and the idea of brokerage or guidance or coaching or tutorship, whatever word you want to use, becomes more and more important. The issue of helping people in the company to do something about training is this kind of initiative. You must pay attention to one thing concerning SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). When an SME is implementing a computer system, they go to a computer company and they say, 'You determine my needs and then you make a suggestion about what programmes and what computers and what network I need. Then you teach me how this works.' When we do training, we have a different approach. Sometime we ask too much from the SMEs. We ask them to do things which are not their job. We cannot ask the SMEs to build up the chip themselves and to put together the screen and to develop a word-processing programme. We have to help them to set it up. Therefore we have to send people into the companies who do the job for them, so that they can focus on their original job, instead of learning our trade which is training. I think this kind of help is very important for companies and it is the way to get training into companies. Experience has shown that if you go into the companies like that you do more than training needs analysis. You are very very quickly on the psychological level. Many SMEs have problems inside and these persons who go inside must have the training also to help to solve other problems than those which are related directly to training.
Q: Just a small comment that my experience in this field tells me that each time somebody learns something in the SME you have to change the organisation in some way. So learning is connected with the development of a new kind of organisation.
Q: I was expecting from this discussion to hear more specific and more technical discussion on the issues of projects which we are implementing within the European section of France, which are benefiting West European countries. The UN system is also putting a lot of effort in the area of education and vocational training in the world, not only in Europe. At the same time the projects which we are implementing in the centre, particularly the last 5 or 6 other projects which have national and transnational complements, are really bringing international organisation, market opportunities, knowhow, exchange of new technologies and human resource management. They are disseminating the positive experiences which exist in North Italy and putting them in contact with companies from Germany, Portugal, France, including universities. Unemployment is almost 12%, average in some countries, more in others, less but also drastically increasing in Germany and other countries. I appreciate the academic approach to the discussion. But also for the benefit of East European and Central European countries which will soon be eligible for money from the European structural funds, I think full technical assistance will be needed. Who will be providing this? I also question the capacity of the European structures to handle this independently. The International Labour Standards is concerned with issues of workers' education and social protection which are the mandate and the role of the international organisation. Once again I want to emphasise this because I am speaking on behalf of this institution.
Q: I am involved in the project on the broker which was discussed earlier on. The financing of the broker or of the programme manager depends on the national system in which he or she works, either market-based financing as in the United States; or public fund-based financing as in Denmark; or company-based funding as in other countries. Just to say also that in relation to what was said from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that we are planning to have a conference which also involves participation from the partner countries later on this year.
Q. (Nicholas Fox, Kent Training Enterprise Council, UK): We have been hearing this morning about a number of different models and approaches that have been tried in different countries to promote employability and competitiveness. The current thrust of European programmes is to let a thousand flowers bloom; each local region can develop its own local model in its own particular way. This produces some very good examples, but there is also the downside that a lot of money is then wasted on bad examples. Are we now reaching a point in European programmes where it would be more efficient to identify a menu of successful models, such as the Danish job rotation model, and to focus European funding on the application of similar models in different countries in different local conditions? The emphasis should be more on how to embed successful models than to try and invent new models.
Marc Ant: I am not sure that everybody would agree on such an approach: the Commission, the European Commission, the European programmes and other member states. We must not forget that European programmes are managed by the European member states, who have a declared tendency to leave it to a local or regional level. Although we have all over Europe more or less the same problems of unemployment and structural change, it is nevertheless the right of each entity, whatever it is, to develop its own models. By no means will it be possible, for legal or for political reasons or even tactical reasons, to implement a 'best model' all over Europe. I think what is going to happen is there will be many models and there will be an evolution; some models will disappear and some models will stay on. LEONARDO is a laboratory of innovation. A laboratory in the classical term can blow up so we will have some bad experiences, but I think sometimes you learn more from a not-so-good experience than from the best practice. I think it would be very difficult to implement. Let us take job rotation. I do not think it would be possible to say from the top down, 'Now let's do job rotation'. But what will happen if the model is successful at the European level? It will become, in many different forms by the way, a more generalised system.
Q: Would it not be very important that we, all of us, would have access to the best practice models? There should be a combination of both approaches: we should know about the best practice models as they have been successful, and then continue with the innovation because, as somebody said earlier today, sometimes the best practice becomes out of date as different circumstances appear and different problems have to be faced. Job rotation might suit some but it might not suit others, and it may be right for now but it may not be right for 3 years' time or 5 years' time or 10 years' time. At least what is very important is that we all have access to what is regarded as best practice. That is essential and then we can adapt it to our own circumstances.
Q: (Nicholas Fox, Kent Training Enterprise Council, UK): Thank you for the opportunity to come back. I am not suggesting there should be a standard model imposed from the top. What I am questioning, to use your laboratory analogy, is that if we have too many variables and too many experiments it is impossible to identify the key lessons. If I think back 10 years ago to the Comet Programme, Comet 2, the range of experiences through a whole range of European programmes. We now have so many experiments and so many models, it is sometimes a little difficult to draw out the key lessons. I am suggesting a move towards coherence, a more efficient mechanism for learning the lesson from projects and applying them and avoiding wasted or duplication. So it is striking the balance rather than being proactive which has been the traditional mode of the European Policy.
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