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Plenary Speeches
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Theme 4
I am going to talk here about reality of business life, about the challenge that we have to generate a workforce that is changing every day, because the environment is changing every day, because the clients are changing every day, because we require more and more and because people have to provide added value, because technology is replacing people. So where have we arrived now? Is it true that we can have learning all over the place? Is it true that we can really create that type of workforce? Is it true that we have an unemployed workforce that is able to be employed? These are some of the questions I would like to raise this morning to you all. Let me talk about the fuzzy image of the learning age. We have been working for the past year and a half for the DGXXII, a group of experts from all over Europe, to find out the reality of the learning age in companies and enterprises and the reality of the learning age in educational field. And what have we done? We created a network of 12 European experts in something called Learning in Firms. We provided data. We went down there and asked companies what were they doing and we did something which was very interesting. We brought together the two worlds, the world of business men and the world of educators. What did we find? The first thing we found was that we had a problem of a language barrier. We didn't have a problem of some of them being French and some English. No. We had a problem of people speaking English and not understanding each other. Different Worlds Sometimes we speak and we do not understand each other. This is a problem when you want to deal with both worlds, the academic, the education world, and the enterprise world. So what do we know? More and more we know that companies require a more flexible workforce. So the only thing that we find out is that training bodies do not seem to be able to provide the help that is needed. What are businesses doing? They are creating their own training bodies. They are creating their own so-called universities. They are telling their educational world, 'If you do not provide me with what I want I am going to do it on my own. I'm not going to wait for you to change. I'll just have to do it.' So what do we know? We know that there is a dramatic revolution going on, everyone is involved in this. We have something that is really something new in sociological terms, which we have called the young elders - a category for people around 44 - 45 years old. We have very competent people 45-50 year old being laid off from companies, not knowing what to do even if they have a full pay pension or at least 80% of full pay. What do we do with this situation? So, I think that new and creative approaches are needed mainly in skill transference, in quality assurance and especially in the use of technology which I am going to talk about in a little moment. No Answers Whatever the answer is, we clearly have not got it, not among enterprises and not among training education bodies. Industry wants results, short term, long term results; they want competitive advantage. They know very well what they want, but they do not know how to get it and how to achieve it, and I'm sorry to say from my experience, from what we have gathered, they dismissed the educational world. On the other side, we have the trainers and the training and education system. We know very well, that learning approaches do not fully understand, or do not want to understand, the motivation and the needs of industry, and do not have the focus of the learning for competitive advantage. They want learning to be for the individual, which is a right; but they do not understand the short term/medium term needs of companies. So where do we start? I am not here to provide you with the answer, but I would just like to share with you some of the answers that we have been discussing in this group I mentioned earlier, which we think we might bring a grain of salt of this whole discussion. In '68, the world was already talking about learning as competitive advantage. It is not something that we have discovered right now; it is something has been going on for a long time. But it does not seem to be very successful. What we know is that with the information age and so on we have a problem, which is that my competitors know exactly what I do, immediately, and that the only asset I have is in the brains of people, and I need them. In order to do that I need a new workers' profile. I need a new approach to what the workers' added value is. Let me start by saying what a competence is. You have to combine the definition of competence as an organised cluster of knowledge, different types of knowledge, with a synergy amongst them. What I want to say is that competence means to be able to do something for someone somewhere. Artificial Intelligence We now come to the field of artificial intelligence, this has been researched for a long time. It involves the idea of the 'structure of an agent.' You are all agents, for example, and an agent possesses three elements of knowledge, main knowledge, task knowledge and interest knowledge. The main and task knowledge are the knowledges that we normally teach in enterprises and that we normally teach for the unemployed. But the interest knowledge, which comprises the processes to achieve the generation of knowledge, is not taught in the whole educational system. We want to have - we have to have - a creative workforce. We want to have problem solvers. But we have children that the moment that they have a new idea, the moment they want to solve a problem, teachers tell them, 'You do not talk. You just obey.' All over Europe this happens. Then we go into the world of the business and they say 'We do not have a workforce that thinks, they only want recipes.' What are the interest competencies? I'm going to emphasise this because I think this is an element which we are not teaching either to the employed nor to the unemployed. I am going to propose to you a little nice little concept that says that life is a matter of problems and problem solving; that when you solve a problem you learn; that when you learn, you increase your knowledge base and you have ideas; and that when you have ideas you want to implement them. Implement them to do what? To improve activities in the company, to improve operations, to improve service. This is something that is going to do two things, increase the competitive advantage of the company and increase the learning of the individual. Now this little concept shows three elements, problem solving, creativity and innovation and absorption of innovation, are elements that no longer differentiate between human beings. These are elements that every single human being needs in order to succeed. We have what we call the interest competencies, there are three of them: the ability to solve problems and respond to the challenge of simulation; the ability to deal with uncertainty; and creativity with a small c (I do not want to invent I just want to do new things every day). But we have a problem which is the technology of confidence. I think technology is becoming a barrier, more and more. I see people in industry who tell me, 'You know, we just bought a new machine, but it is so complicated! Just to put it to work we had a special course; the workers did not understand it; I did not understand it. We spent a month trying to put that machine to work.' You do not have to look at a new industrial machine. Just look around at home. Have you bought a video tape recorder lately? Have you looked at the instructions of the video tape recorder? I mean I feel I'm a reasonably intelligent person but this is hopeless. I mean, I do not understand my video tape recorder, nor my washing machine, nor my microwave oven, so what do I do? I try to give it to my youngest daughter. She's 17 and she tells me, 'Oh you don't understand anything.' I say, 'I probably don't, but this is so complicated.' Internet A problem that we have is the Internet. There is such a blah, blah, blah about the Internet. You know what it is called: the world wide wait, not web, wait. Have you ever waited so much as in front of Internet? It is frustrating. Then the communications and then everyone is linking at the same time and then you do not find any information, then you have hundreds of tonnes of information. So please let us be reasonable with all this. I have seen it does help a lot, but I think we may have a problem of illiteracy. Let me tell you something, we need to develop a European response to all this. I am a little bit tired of always having to go behind the US. I am a little bit tired of always having to find the same ways of the US. Why cannot we have our own cultural technological approach? Why can we not provide a differentiated approach towards all this? Because we have a problem. The American students feel much more comfortable with the use of technology than European students. We have data on that. That is a drawback, because those students are going to be managers, and we are going to have managers that do not feel as comfortable with technology as other managers all over the world. We have a problem there, and we have a problem also that the naive knowledge, the knowledge that you think the world should have is no longer there. You need something which is called scientific knowledge in order to be able to afford the changes that you have around you - you, the employed and the unemployed, young ones and the new elder. So I give you the wonderful word of ITC, Inference and Technological Competencies. Proposition Here is my proposition. The main point I would like to draw from all this is that ITC competence needs to be developed in the employed and the unemployed workforce with a problem; that the employed workforce gets it in a very friendly way, in a very non-sophisticated way. You all have a friend who is a whizz, a friend who knows about all these things, a friend that you go over to at work and you ask, 'Listen, this new Powerpoint, what should I do with it, how should I deal with it?' and he or she normally helps. This friendly friend, is doing a tremendous job for you. He or she is teaching you something that you need in order to survive. The problem is the unemployed do not normally have a friend like this, and we need to be aware that we are divorcing the unemployed more and more from what are everyday life competencies; and technology is creating a problem in there. So what we teach the unemployed is, if you remember the words, domain and task competencies, skills, abilities, technologies probably. But what we do not teach the unemployed is ITC, problem solving innovation for activity and technology. My proposition is that ITC should be opened up for everyone. What do I mean? What I mean is that we need to make everyone aware of ITC, have access and implementation. We need to open it to workers, to non working people, to enterprises and to knowledge-providing services, all of them. What should they know about? About problem solving, about creativity, about absorption of innovation and about technology challenge. What I want, ladies and gentlemen, is to have that all across Europe, from both fields, from the field of education and from the field of business and industry, because we need that. To sum up, what I want is to give the world a note of advice, that we need to develop those competencies, particularly in an area which is called small and medium size enterprises. I think we need to look at small and medium size enterprises, especially small, or micro enterprises, because they are the answer to part of the problem. We are not going to be able to provide the 20 million jobs, we need in Europe. We are going to have to create 20 million new enterprises. So, I have a message, that maybe today's employed workforce is going to be tomorrow's unemployed workforce. What do we do with these people? Do we have a moral obligation? Companies tell you they do not have any moral obligation, but I think they do. I think they do and I think there are very exciting things being done, in this country as a matter of fact. We need to realise that we probably going to have to develop specific measures for those who are in the future going to be unemployed, and those measures need to be also for the unemployed, the actual unemployed, the long term unemployed. Well I'm going to propose two ideas. That we are going to have to really assess the competencies needed to survive and to be competitive - interpretership. This is also a jazzy word, which is now very much in the mode. Interpretership means to have creativity problem-solving innovation inside a company. And that can be taught. An interpretership means to have to develop ITC competencies. Enterprise of One Now imagine that you think that every single human person in Europe is an enterprise of one. As an enterprise of one they need to have visibility competencies, they need to have a competitive advantage. Then maybe you can start thinking how you can bridge that gap. There's a first element and a last element that I would like to mention. This should be a win-win situation. This is like negotiation: you never should put your back against a wall, because, if you do, the problem that you might have is that you are going to have to react violently to be able to open things up. So what we need to have is the industry and education world being in a win-win situation, for workers and for training. This an important revolution, it means that the training bodies need to get in a new image, that the companies need to get new knowledge from the training bodies and that the unemployed remain a problem.
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