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Plenary Speeches
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Theme 1 |
Theme 2 |
Theme 3 |
Theme 4
Major, even shocking, changes are impacting upon us and are being absorbed, almost without analysis. So there are current paradigms in our classification systems which are actually fading into uselessness. It is fascinating. With investments becoming completely mobile, financial markets of the world are actually, in their own spheres of influence, even more powerful today than national government. Boundaries between the public sector and the private sector. Industrial classification systems are already outmoded. Organisations are increasingly becoming virtual, small teams co-ordinating a network of separate organisations and individuals in the global business. Information and communication technologies release the individual from the tyranny of the fixed desk. The keys to corporate competitiveness are changing too. Today, successful businesses are small, dynamic, highly responsive, innovative, agile, intensely customer focused, flexible and efficient. And technology, whilst increasingly ubiquitous will never be the sole driver of that success, though its absence would inevitably prevent companies from being effective. At the heart of competitiveness in today's organisations is still that most flexible, creative, inspirational technology yet discovered. It is people, and the experience of people in work is changing too. Predictability of work is completely gone. Fixed job descriptions, tasks and functional boundaries are being replaced by team working, collective responsibility and broad changing roles. Individuals are increasingly multi-skilled; they work in teams; they change roles and responsibilities regularly. Today's engineer is tomorrow's project manager and the salesman of the day after that. Today's employee is tomorrow's consultant and following day's owner/manager or self employed. Job security is disappearing too, not that it ever really existed actually. A job for life was only ever available to a privileged minority, and has in fact been a construct of the 20th century. It only existed for a limited period, but it has been a paradigm by which individual security has been judged and that is causing insecurity to enter the expectations of most of today's and tomorrow's workforce. Transferring Risk So what are we doing? We are replacing job security by employability, by the principle that, through training and continued professional development, individuals can maintain the currency of their knowledge and skills and thus their values and opportunities in the labour market. Many rightly wonder whether this is an adequate substitute, or whether merely this is a way of the employer transferring the burden of risk from the employer to the individual - and the transfer of risk is not just education and training. As an individual's reliance on an employer is reduced, so too is their personal responsibility for pensions, healthcare, financial affairs, childcare increased. It is not an issue for discussion at today's conference, but it is an important issue if social inclusion is actually going to be addressed properly. So how do nations manage all this? How do we maintain competitiveness, secure our skills base and individual employability, and maintain opportunities for all? Manage it we must, jointly as governments, as employers and as individuals. We will have to remember that our goal cannot be blind growth, it cannot be success for a minority at the expense of many others. We can no longer wish the upheavals and cycles of uncontrolled growth and uncontrollable decline, of comfort and wealth for some and inequity and division for others. What we actually have to aim for is a competitive society, which essentially achieves a dynamic equilibrium between wealth creation on the one hand and social creation on the other, between competitiveness and social inclusion. We must aim for a society in which all stakeholders recognise that long term and sustainable wealth creation demands commitment to providing access for all, so that all can participate equitably in the opportunities that are available. Achieving a competitive society therefore requires a commitment from the private and the public sectors to work in partnership, at national and regional levels and at the level of the community and the firm. It requires business to acknowledge a shared responsibility to their shareholders, their employees and the community in which they operate; in return businesses, whose primary role is to generate its wealth, must be able to benefit from an environment and an infrastructure which enables them to achieve their full competitive potential. At the core of that society, lie people and skills. While some individual firms may be able successfully to pursue low skill, low value added opportunities, such an option is not available at the national level for either the UK or for Europe. We cannot compete successfully at the low end of the market, against countries where the cost of labour is less than 1/10th of our own. So we need to pursue the maintenance of a high value added economy. Critical success factors shown here are all dependant on people. Those who can take ownership of the management of their own learning and commit to investing in higher skills will be more likely to succeed, individually better able to cope with structural change in employment, because investment in learning will open up a wider range of career and employment choices and enhance their work satisfaction. Learning Society In other words, what we have to move to is not just to a collection of learning organisations, but in fact to become a learning society. This I have thought to define such a society in terms of the four main characteristics that it would have:
2. All individuals are enabled to, and do: plan and choose relevant quality learning and take part in and manage their own learning 3. Employers have become learning organisations and support individuals in achieving their goals 4. Entitlement to learning is not limited by age. In short, it will have been achieved when all people are expected, enabled and entitled to learn throughout their lives, cumulating in a real change in attitude and behaviour. The drivers of our learning society have to be the learners, whether they are individuals or organisations, because learning's fundamental role is as the creator of future opportunity. By ensuring that individuals can attain and maintain the highest level of skills to which they can aspire, we can ensure that industry has access to the skills it needs and individuals have access to the opportunities they merit. So what steps should we be taking as national government and national agencies? Drawing on this definition let me offer you some positive steps that I think can bring together competitiveness, employability and social inclusion. The first step is to address the problem of how we ensure that learning becomes the expected norm. It is not enough simply to encourage; our judgement of success is not in the change of messages we send, but within the change of behaviour those messages generate. What we need to do is to make more effort and invest more in ensuring that we convince individuals that the changes that we are enduring at the moment are changes that are permanent and ongoing, and likely to change even more radically rather than stay the same. What is very important in this is to put the learner at the heart of our messages. In the UK we have sought to launch a National Campaign for Learning, but we need to ensure, by proper engagement of the media, that we achieve far more by sending a message that helps every individual to understand that engagement is an option of no choice: we must learn if we are to survive. Next we must ensure that individuals are enabled to plan and choose their own learning. Our occupational and industrial classifications are already out of date and irrelevant and they need dramatic revival. The problem is that if we take the 3 to 5 years that it would typically take us in Europe to invent another set of classifications, they will be outmoded by then too. So we need to find a better way of addressing the issue. But overall we need to put together information, advice and guidance, using technology wherever appropriate, and provide far more flexible access to advice and information to help adults learn. In the UK we are going down the route of a national helpline, Learning Direct, but in my view that will only be part of the problem. It is important to take these messages and make them accessible to the individuals where they work and where they live. What we need is a national framework of places and systems, and a technology-based system that enables individuals to access information advice and support where they are and when they need it. At a time when knowledge and information is only a mouse click away, the important learning is how to apply that knowledge, not simply how to acquire it. I believe we need to review and revise the whole pedagogy on which school, college and university education is based. We must move away from the knowledge and information based pedagogy to one that is based on the application and utilisation of knowledge to achieve desired goals. It is a fundamental change and visibly we have not yet even started work on it. Institutions themselves have to be revised. Just in Time When do we learn? We must relate to just-in-time learning applied on the scale that we need it, at the time and place that it is needed. Learning is global and in fact it is easier for me - I live in Ealing, I live on the very street on which the Thames Valley University is based - but it is easier for me to do more active learning by accessing learning sites on the Internet than by walking down the road, because at the time I get home and walk down the road the university is not open, but the Internet is. And so I in fact learn at a university in the Caribbean because some of their open learning courses are exceptionally well designed. There are no boundaries to the global learning market place and we need to ensure that our institutions of tomorrow and indeed those of today recognise it. Employers must become learning organisations. In the UK we are moving forward by introducing a standard called Investors in People. It has been an exceptionally good and powerful standard. It seeks to engage employers more actively, getting them to play a more dynamic role in ensuring their own growth as learning organisations, and developing the skills of their workforce. The four principles on which it is based are that the company:-
We have made very good progress; more than 90% of all UK companies are aware of the standard. Over three-quarters of large companies, and almost a half of medium sized companies, are actually already in engaged and working with it. Thirty per cent of the UK workforce is involved in those companies, and yet we still have the situation where less than 8% of the smaller medium enterprises, which is where the growth of tomorrow and where 50% of the current workforce is based, are engaged with the standard. There is also I think a case for asking whether in fact Investors in People, having operated incredibly successfully since 1992, does not need refocusing and developing further to take into account the requirements needed to help organisations more successfully become learning organisations. I believe it is time to review that standard and update it for tomorrow's employment - and, increasingly, for this afternoon's employers. Recording Achievement There is a real issue in a global marketplace about how we record achievement, if learners and learning are portable and employers are looking for some form of validation. It can be there of course, if learning is spread on a more modular and ongoing basis across time, across place, across institution, if it is accredited with an external institution, across qualification frameworks and nations. There is a real issue about the way in which we accredit learning. In the UK we do not even have a national accreditation system that is sufficient to be able to cross-recognise qualifications between institutions and awarding bodies. We are operating in a Europe which is moving towards a single currency next year, and we have not even started serious discussion about how we develop an international learning record that enables individuals' achievements to be recognised wherever they go, or wherever employment opportunities takes them. Lastly, how do we pay for lifelong learning? In my view in tomorrow's society where all three parties gain, then paying for learning is a tripartite function, falling on the individual, the employer and the state where necessary. I believe that society has to offer the opportunity for individuals to participate in learning, when they need to, and that means accessing learning whether or not they've got the cash, ensuring that they have the access to the system and the ability to repay over time. In other words, we need to look at opportunities to help individuals save and borrow and take credit to learn, and I think there is a very strong argument for placing indeed the whole of the adult public funding through some form of individual learning account which ensures that it is the learner, the customer, that has control of the funding that actually insures the establishment of an effective market in training and education for tomorrow's global market place. Interestingly, it also seems to me appropriate that maybe we should start thinking about establishing the UK Individual Learning Accounts in Europe. Put all those issues together and I believe we can actually achieve a situation, where we can successfully combine the political challenge of addressing competitiveness and social inclusion, by providing lifelong learning in a way that reaches all adults and which ensures that their employability really does create the nirvana of a competitive society. This will be a society where we really have managed to achieve that appropriate balance between wealth creation on the one hand and the opportunity for individuals to lead a fulfilling and satisfying life on the other. That I think is the challenge of Europe today; it is the challenge of this conference for today and tomorrow.
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