Workshop A - Session 2

Title: Employability and Competitiveness - Learning Organisations Chair: Sarah Perman, Trades Union Congress, UK Jim Sutherland, UNISON, UK

Workplace learning has a central role in any national strategy for lifelong learning. However, if it is to play its full part it needs to be looked at in a more open way than is often the case. We can no longer rely solely on traditional approaches, the training arrangements put in place by the larger companies. We must recognise the importance of involving non-traditional learners and people in small and medium-sized enterprises. The importance of their contribution cannot be overstated.

We need to recognise and work towards key objectives needed to underpin a broad, inclusive policy framework in pursuit of sustainable employability for individuals, long- term product or service success for employers, improvements in national economic performance and social cohesion within communities.

To achieve this we need to bring on board the contribution that can be made to successful learning by the various stakeholders and emphasise the importance of genuine partnership between stakeholders in identifying and satisfying learning needs. The motivation and development of non-traditional learners will be a key consideration together with the links between new forms of accreditation and access.

Individual Access to Learning

UNISON's successful Return to Learn initiative recognised all those factors. It recognised that there has to be phased access to learning that is individual, to enable people to enter learning at a level that is appropriate to the current state of learning they have, to be able to learn at a pace which is suitable for them. And that puts great pressure on methodologies of learning delivery.

Learning delivery has to offer progression at the same time as encouraging the desire to move forward. It has to have a variety of provision, which ensures that not only is learning in the workplace about providing individuals with the kind of fast, specific and job-related skills they need to be efficient in their current employment, but to provide them with parallel and transferable skills and opportunities for personal development that go beyond the work place - and indeed help create holes in the organisation by people leaving, and therefore making restructuring less painful than otherwise it might be.

There has to be a range of accreditation that rewards learning. It is not simply focused on individuals having to enter into learning based on time-specific qualification-based opportunities. And finally it has to be grounded in genuine partnership between all the shareholders. Too often partnership has been seen to be between the employer and the provider, ignoring the learner.

I believe that having Trade Unions representing the learners involved in that process of partnership, legitimises the purposes and processes of learning. It ensures the coherent and forward looking strategy for learning, at, for and through the workplace, involving long- term planning. Such involvement would help defuse suspicion and fear about the consequences of improved efficiency and productivity on job security, and it would give individuals marketable competence and skills, enabling them to seek employment elsewhere, when the inevitable change caused by economic forces and technology occurs.

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