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Employment and Skills – 21st Century Stylee?

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  • How do we develop a workforce that is Fit for the Future?
  • How do we tackle the problems of ‘worklessness’?

Important questions that we have sought solutions to for most of my working life.

Broadly speaking we have two possible approaches.  We can  set up a committee of the great and the good, employers, politicians, civil servants from Learning and Skills and Job Centre Plus and we can task them with collating evidence on labour markets, forecasting the future and identifying practical and affordable opportunities to intervene in the systems of education and worklessness that will make sure we develop the workforce that we need, when we need it.  This centralised approach puts power and resources in the hands of an Employment and Skills Board and sets them an impossible task.  It is the Soviet approach to planning tractor production.  It didn’t work for them.  And it hasn’t worked for us.

This approach results in a relatively small number of experiments (pilots) that are later rolled out.  It relies on a committee to accurately ‘read’ the future – to spot opportunities for job creation and then to exert an influence on the ‘production system’ quickly enough to make a positive difference.  This is usually done by setting targets, shifting resources and waiting to see how things unfold.  Strategies are typically set for perhaps half a decade and ‘refreshed’ annually – single-handedly tackling the worklessness agenda by employing a small army of civil servant and academics to collect data and produce reports.

Such boards end up being an ‘interesting’ balance between the voice of the private sector and democratic accountability.  In fact they usually become stylized ‘war zones’ from which the private sector often retreats beaten into submission by public sector and academic working practices.  Certainly the voice of the small business sector is rarely effectively heard.

Board strategies usually find a few ‘keys’ (NVQs, Diplomas, accredited in-house training, apprenticeships) to a few kingdoms (construction, health and beauty, tourism, call centres, and anything prefixed with ‘creative’, ‘digital’, ‘bio’, ‘high tech’ or ‘high growth’).  Aspirations and strengths of people are subordinated to the Board’s ideas about future skills needs and ‘opportunities’.  Conformity is valued over originality.  Learning ‘off piste’ becomes tricky.

Alternatively we could radically de-centralise and localise the process of thinking and planning about ‘fitness for the future’.  Instead of relying on an Employer Skills Boards to ‘make things right’ we could lay down a challenge to people to develop the skills and passions that they need to secure an economically viable future for themselves, to find what, for them, is ‘good work‘.  To  find their own contribution.   We could develop enterprising people supported in enterprising communities.  This would need schools and colleges to focus on the learner and their vision for their future rather than on the curriculum or qualification structures.

Such a decentralised, enterprising approach might:

  • enable many more informed brains to be brought to bear on the problem of fitness for the future – academics, industrialists and civil servants do not have a great track record in ‘workforce development’
  • enable people to explore ways of doing what they can do best – and not sub-optimising to conform with the ‘few keys to the few kingdoms’ identified by ‘The Board’
  • encourage the local community to support people in acquiring the skills, experience and work opportunities that they need to flourish economically and socially
  • support people to find learning experiences that help them to become the person that they want to be – rather than to conform with the ideal established by a fallible and distant Board
  • significantly increase the volume of learning experiments in the labour market and enable word of mouth to make sure that we develop a dynamic, flexible, responsive and self-reliant workforce

Perhaps these are not alternatives.  Perhaps we need to develop both strategic and responsive approaches to employment, skills and worklessness in the 21st century.

One thing I am sure of… establishing yet another Employment and  Skills Board (this time for the Leeds City Region) is unlikely to give us a major step forward.

My notes on Doug Richard’s Entrepreneurship Manifesto

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While reading the manifesto I made some pretty comprehensive notes and numbered them for ease of reference.  No analysis yet – just my notes…pieces that especially provoke or intrigue me I have highlighted in blue…

Doug Richards Entrepreneurs Manifesto

1 Public declarations aimed at supporting UKs 4.4m entrepreneurs

2 Manifesto

2.1 A statement of principles highlighting challenges to overcome to release entrepreneurship

2.2 Spectre of capitalism

2.2.1 Greedy bankers

2.2.2 Amoral corporations

  • Pitting tax regimes against each other
  • Failure of a global commons means they can escape costs of infrastructure and society that supports them

2.2.3 Bloated State incapable of controlling capitalism

  • failing to deal with poverty, worklessness etc
  • Outgrowing the economy
  • We are demonstrably poorer – the system does not work

2.2.4 States competing to be servants of capitalism

2.2.5 The environment has no voice/the consumer no collective

2.3 Unleashing the Wealth Creators

2.3.1 Wealth of the nation rests on entrepreneurial activity

2.3.2 The state as a servant of society

2.3.3 Must harness the power of the entrepreneur to improve services

2.3.4 Size of the state is not the enemy

2.3.5 State run services immune from creative destruction

2.3.6 Fairness of the least…only the State can ensure fairness in health, education etc – no-one can have more than the least.

We cannot improve until we can improve everyone – and therefore we improve no-one

2.3.7 State’s role is to create playing fields on which entrepreneurs can be released to deliver service

2.3.8 Harness collective creative self interest of our entrepreneurial output for the benefit of meeting our social objectives

We will see a flowering of ideas, a manifold unfolding of new approaches and a gale of creative destruction

3 Declaration of Rights

3.1 Practical recommendations to clear the path for an explosion in entrepreneurship

3.1.1 Entrepreneurial culture as the only force that exists for growth, prosperity, fairness and social justice

3.1.2 Not about privilege; few getting rich at expense of poor;

3.1.3 About creating ladders of social mobility

3.1.4 Increasing wealth so we can afford services, health education etc

3.1.5 To harness entrepreneurship first we must understand it

  • Risk and reward

3.1.6 Must increase economic freedoms for all businesses taking business risks

3.1.7 Cut the time it takes to start a new business

3.1.8 Streamline regulations, exempt small business where possible

3.1.9 Get government out of Business Support – just focus on regulation

3.1.10 Free up family savings for investment in nascent business with credits and exemptions

3.1.11 Stop paying people to be unemployed – share costs of ‘teaching them to be employed’

3.1.12 Employers have no means to underwrite the costs of turning students into productive employees

3.1.13 Govt is largest consumer – must change procurement patterns

  • Must drive revenue to entrepreneurs
  • Open doors to innovation

3.1.14 Use new legal frameworks to broaden scope for social entrepreneurs – encouraging for profit co-owned businesses and for profits that deliver social benefits

3.1.15 Understand that we do not understand

3.1.16 Must empower people to step out on their own, take risk, hope for reward and move on from failure.

3.1.17 The corrosive impact of an over protective state is not merely the loss of our sense of responsibility to a civil society; it is the even more profound loss of our sense of capacity to change society, to have an impact, to be an entrepreneur.

3.1.18 Entrepreneurship can be taught and must be learned

Enterprise Development Needs a Very Different Response

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If we are serious about developing more enterprising individuals and communities, rather than managing the outputs that most enterprise funders are looking for (start ups and VAT registrations), we need to concern ourselves with the development of self-interest and the accrual of power through organisation, association, collaboration and the acquisition of ‘knowhow’.   We are in the realms of person centred facilitation, community development and education.  Not business planning.  This requires an enormous shift both in what we do, and how we do it.

Helping people to clarify their self-interest and find the power to pursue it requires very different structures and processes to those that we currently use to develop enterprise. It is not about setting up a business.  It is not about experiencing ‘Industry Days’ at school or attending ‘Enterprise’ Conferences with (not so) secret millionaires, dragons and ministers.  It is not about Catalyst Centres and managed workspaces (although these might be useful for the small percentage of people who choose entrepreneurship as the most appropriate way to express their enterprising souls).

It is about engaging in a dynamic and continuous reflection on who we are and what we want to become, and managing processes that will help us move in that direction in a complex and rapidly changing world.

The Davies Review defined enterprise as  the capacity to:

  1. handle uncertainty and respond positively to change – Resilience
  2. create and implement new ideas and ways of doing things – Creativity and change
  3. make reasonable risk/reward assessments and act upon them in one’s personal and working life – The Pursuit of Progress

No mention of employment, entrepreneurship or business. Instead it is about resilience, change making and progress.  Enterprise development needs to find a new home where this broader conception can flourish without the distorting, primarily economic calculus of entrepreneurs and The Treasury.  They will have much to offer to the development of entrepreneurship – but that is only ever likely to be relevant to a minority.  Enterprise needs to escape, what for many is, the deadening hand of business.

The art and science of enterprise is relevant to all and we need to build communities and relationships that understand how to nurture it.

One of my big regrets is that so little LEGI funding has been used to drive this sort of innovation.  Instead it has been used, often wastefully, in the short term pursuit of business startups and in placing cuckoos in the heart of some of our poorest communities.

Anyone up for some innovation in Local Enterprise?

Precautions for All Governments – John McKnight

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In John McKnight’s ‘Building Communities from the Inside Out’ is a chapter on ‘Providing support for asset based development: Policies and Guidelines’.  John may not be the greatest crafter of a punchy headline on the planet, but he does understand the process of community development – and the content of this section is right on the money.

In a section called ‘Precautions for all Governments’ he points out the problems that governments and other institutions of the state have in working with what are often small, simple and informal community development groups.  He suggests that often, in trying to play its role, government ends up ‘dominating, distorting and demeaning’ the work of local people.  McKnight offers a few principles that can help government officials (council officers, RDA employees etc) to avoid this ‘overbearing propensity’.

To paraphrase:

  • Remember that government workers and programmes are public servants.  A servant supports and does not control.  A servant never suggests that an employee might ‘participate’ in the servants’ work.  The servant finds how best to serve the employer.
  • Understand the limits to government.  If it replaces the work of citizens and their associations it will not create a healthy society –  but a dependent one.  The community will look to government to solve local problems and government will be unable to fulfil this role.  Local problems will worsen. ‘Secure, wise and just communities are created by citizens and their associations and enterprises, supported by governments making useful investments in local assets’.
  • Let local people who do the work take the credit.  Don’t send the mayor to ‘cut the ribbon’.  Let those that did the work have the glory.  Send the mayor to thank them.
  • Don’t replace local associations and institutions with new systems and agencies.  ‘One of the most significant causes of weakened local citizen initiatives, associational work and institutional capacity has been the introduction of new government sponsored structures and organisations.  As new organisations appear in the neighbourhood with impressive buildings or offices, lots of money and well paid outside professionals (sounds familiar?) they unintentionally but necessarily replace some of the power, authority and legitimacy of local groups.  Although they assert that they are there to strengthen community, they are likely to replace community initiatives.’
  • Government representatives should ask “What do you local people think we should do to support you?” rather than “We have this new programme we are bringing to your community.”
  • Ones size does not fit all.  Characteristics of local projects are diversity, proliferation and informality.  Government and bureaucracy however is more often characterised by uniformity, standardisation and formality.  They usually seek to develop processes and systems that will ‘fit all’.  This approach is structurally and culturally ‘at odds’ with creative local initiatives that are vital to community regeneration.

One of the challenges that I believe government (local, regional and national) and its agencies has to address is how best do we make our expertise and professional ‘knowhow’ available to community groups?  Instead they appear to be have succeeded in co-opting the expertise and knowhow of community groups to deliver governments’ policies programmes and targets on dependent and disempowered communities.

Time for a change methinks.

Good Work….

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Just reading Schumacher’s Good Work again.  Although the original lectures on which the book was based were first given in the 1970s it seems that we have made little progress in helping people with the challenge of finding good work.

From the Foreword…

At the heart of our system of work lies our system of values, and more precisely, our view of the individual and his relationships with others. By way of illustration, consider one of the current pseudo-intellectual clichés, that work is part of the Protestant ethic and that a more enlightened view of it is (presumably) that the less work you can get away with, the better.

This is a cynical and degraded view of human nature (certainly not subscribed to by any religion that I know of) because it assumes that money is the sole reason for working. Set this view against Schumacher’s opening remarks in this book, in which he identifies three purposes of human  work:

  • to produce necessary and useful goods and services;
  • to enable us to use and perfect our gifts and skills; and
  • to serve, and collaborate with, other people, so as to “liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.”

…

From the Preface….

A recent article in the London Times began with these words:

“Dante, when composing his visions of hell, might well have included the mindless, repetitive boredom of working on a factory assembly line. It destroys initiative and rots brains, yet millions of British workers are committed to it for most of their lives.”

The remarkable thing is that this statement, like countless similar ones made before it, aroused no interest: there were no hot denials or anguished agreements; no reactions at all. The strong and terrible words “visions of hell,” “destroys initiative and rots brains,” and so on–attracted no reprimand that they were misstatements or overstatements, that they were irresponsible or hysterical exaggerations or subversive propaganda; no, people read them, sighed and nodded, I suppose, and moved on.

Not even  the ecologists,  conservationists,  and doom watchers are interested in this matter. If someone had asserted that certain man-made arrangements destroyed the initiative and rotted the brains of millions of birds or seals or wild animals in the game reserve of Africa, such an assertion would have been either refuted or accepted as a serious challenge. If someone had asserted that not the minds and brains of millions of workers were being rotted but their bodies, again there would have been considerable interest.

After all, there are safety regulations, inspectors, claims for damages, and so forth. No management is unaware of its duty to avoid accidents or physical conditions which impair workers’ health. But workers’ brains, minds, and souls are a different matter.