Employability and Competitiveness - Report Back

Reporter Paolo Federighi, University of Florence, Italy, with John Humphrys

I shall make my presentation in four points.

First point, employability. In our group we agreed to say that employability is based on complex competences, job related, transferable competences, personal competences, which means that employability concerns not only the training of the producers, that is, employers and employees, but also citizens in general.

Employability is not a magical concept such as lifelong learning. Employability is a new battlefield; increasing employability can increase work opportunities. It also increases competitiveness amongst the workers and from the point of view of companies it is obvious that more employability means that the workforce may move horizontally. To get to employability you have to have an educational environment, or even educational environments, and for that you have to look at the workplace and put forward measures such as job rotations and models such as the learning organisation. We also noted that, if a company can transform itself as a learning organisation, the non-employability of workers can be a product of negative learning produced by the company. This could be a ground for conflicts on which the ability to act by the company becomes very important.

My second point is educational environments. We talked about training and research systems. To have employability the training systems must change dramatically. The systems must get away from a culture of self legitimisation, from the model of only courses, and must support much more. There must be a change in the content as well. All the systems must consider as a main task the training for initiative abilities of the individuals. You must as well create new training ways within the various systems - working services, financial services - ways in the company, so you must go through integration of the various systems, but also create new learning systems, such as systems to analyse and manage the needs for learning of companies.

My third point, the employability concept traces the whole of the individual as producer. The reference point is not only the company and you must recognise in each individual the right to learn for himself, to manage his or her learning, but also to organise himself or herself for learning. The idea is to get rid of educational barriers, which could be the source of negative learning.

A further point, the political consequences. Lifelong learning is not the panacea, it is a new ground for conflict of powers, powers about the distribution of opportunities for training for example. Therefore the ability of social partners should be developed so that they can face up to these potential conflicts and negotiations must be set up so that the individual educational interests are defended. It is important that lifelong learning should be part of the background of social partners.

At institutional level there should be a change in culture and strategy. In the past learning policies meant that you either financed or reinforced the systems offered by the providers. Lifelong learning should now encourage the expression of an individual demand. Employability policy and the policy for lifelong learning means that you should have an economic policy in this sector. You have to have financial support, which cannot be assumed as it was in the past; you have to look at who is going to finance the new system and we have to find an answer to it.

Speaker One

The views of our group, the 3 working groups that Paolo and I participated in were quite divided on this. They saw a role for the individual themselves to pay, for the employer to pay, for unions to participate in payment as well and also for the state.

We had an excellent example from a British union, Unison. That was an example of a union working in partnership with individuals, employers and the state to provide training for often very low skilled individuals. They had really some very impressive results.

The issue that came up very strongly on the question of who pays was: what do you do about lack of financial resources? We may well be looking at a shift of responsibility from the employer to the individual to take the initiative for their own training and pay for it. What do you then do when there are resource lacks. There were all kinds of ideas, things like credits and loans from the state or from regional bodies, things like tax breaks, things like treating learning as an investment and not as a one off payment that you see as something lost.

Speaker Two

I think the thrust of the three working groups that I participated in was that the thing to do was to encourage employers to invest in training. We saw lots of really good examples and initiatives that worked by convincing employers that training and investment in training was crucial for their competitiveness. We even heard in one of the groups from a very small firm that had grasped the nettle and had seen investment in their human resource as a means of added competitive advantage and they had seen it pay off.

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