Sydney University has as a Latin motto: Sidere mens eadem
mutato. It translates as 'the same minds under different
stars'. According to Lucy Hughes Turnbull, a former Lord Mayor of
the city, the university's founders in the 1850s wanted to make the
point that the only differences between the then new colony and
Britain were geographical, not cultural. In many ways the same is
true currently for skills policy. Australia's skills policy and
issues are similar to those of the UK. Its responses to those
issues are also often similar, although Australia is trying a new
approach to skill formation. There might be lessons for the UK in
general, and Scotland in particular, in this new approach.
As in Scotland (and the UK generally), Australia has spent most
of the past few decades pursuing a market-driven approach to
training. As a consequence, individuals and firms have been left to
pursue their own respective interests. More recently, Australia,
like Scotland, has massively expanded its higher education sector
to meet the challenge of the knowledge economy. Certainly over the
next five years most job growth in Australia is predicted to be in
health, education and professional, scientific and technical
services. Skills are held up as the answer to Australia's
productivity problem just as they are in Scotland and the rest of
the UK. Indeed, the UK Commission on Employment and Skills
frequently engages with its Australian counterpart, Skills
Australia.
It is more than just policy context that Scotland shares with
Australia: the emergent issues are the same. For example a
disconnect is apparent between policy and practice, with concerns
about the nature and quality of much private training provision,
and the capacity of government to respond adequately to sectoral
skill shortages and individual firm skill needs. Indeed Richard
Hall of the Faculty of Economics at Sydney University and an expert
on skills in Australia concludes that there are "clear signs that
the system is not working". There is, he says, "evidence of
significant skills wastage".
The expansion of higher education seems to have compounded the
problem. In the 1990s a raft of colleges becoming new universities
and the remaining colleges started delivering some higher
education. The result appears to be an over-qualified workforce.
Skills Australia reports that around 30 per cent of graduates are
now over-qualified for their jobs. Over 40 per cent of employers
admit that their employees possess more skills than are used at
work. As Skills Australia points out, there is therefore
significant "untapped potential" in Australian workplaces.
At the same time, some Australian employers complain about skill
shortages, most notably in the resources industry covering mining,
construction and gas. Australia fared well during the recent
economic downturn, with a short and shallow dip. Its national
economic buoyancy is heavily dependent on natural resources
extraction and export, principally to China - hence the employers'
concern about skill shortages is shared by government. Many of the
vacancies needing to be filled are in skilled trades. However ideas
about imposing training obligations and levies on employers have
met with resistance. Instead employers want the government to speed
up arrangements to allow skilled migrants easier entry into the
country to slot into jobs unfilled by Australians.
If the resources boom is short-lived it's an understandable
position for employers to adopt. If the boom is long-term, its
political sustainability as a strategy becomes doubtful. Moreover,
such an approach won't deliver a trained indigenous workforce.
Already the main opposition parties in Australia make political
capital with the government over perceptions of an immigration
policy muddle. Trying another tack, the government wants to revamp
the industry's apprentice scheme to enable adult workers quicker
training and access to unfilled vacancies. Under some proposals
four year apprenticeships could be slashed to 18 months. Trade
unions worry about the devaluation of qualifications. It is an
issue which has echoes with potential developments in the UK:
English apprenticeships in the construction industry are now
pitched at Level 2, putting pressure on the industry in Scotland to
drop its Level 3 requirements, as Dr. Pauline Anderson of Glasgow
Caledonian University revealed recently in her research on the
skilled trades.
The broader policy response echoes similar policy development in
Scotland: a shift from supply-led to demand-sensitive skill
formation. As Hall explains "investment in training for higher
skills is necessary if Australia is to avoid a low skills, low
value-added, low wage future. However simply training more skilled
workers is inadequate. The way in which work and jobs are organised
and the ways in which organisations use and deploy skill are
critical."
In September this year Skills Australia organised a large
national conference of employers, unions, training providers and
government to explore ways to increase productivity, employee
engagement and job satisfaction through better use of skills in the
workplace. Building on the success of the conference, it will soon
launch research to generate a series of case studies to identify
best practice skill utilisation. The aim is to raise awareness
amongst employers about the benefits of improved skill use in the
workplace.
Referencing the work of the Skills Utilisation Leadership Group
in Scotland, Skills Australia recognises that finding appropriate
case studies will be tricky but important. It also appreciates that
employers don't always recognise the language of skill utilisation
and so have difficulty responding to calls to do it better.
At the same time Australia is trying a new approach to skill
formation. The market-driven strategy has come under criticism, but
there is little political appetite for a tripartite style social
partnership strategy. The alternative is an integrated approach
that embeds workforce development with skill ecosystems.
It is an approach first tried in the US and with which the UK
Government briefly flirted in 2001 but perhaps without fully
balancing the importance of demand as well as supply-side inputs.
In short, workforce development, with its emphasis on delivering
the skills that employers need when they need them and employees
jobs with higher skills, more training and clear career paths, is
promoted within systems of not just supply and demand but also
industrial relations, training, taxation and welfare. It is an
approach that is typically regional and encourages interdependent
collaborative networks and partnerships amongst different agencies
and actors, and usually triggered by an external catalyst such as
government demand for regional growth or a sector problem that
cannot be solved without multi-stakeholder involvement.
Projects have mainly operated at the state level in Australia,
for example in New South Wales and Queensland. With the demise of
the industry skills councils (similar to the UK's Sector Skills
Councils) money was made available in Queensland to encourage
collective responsibility for skills problems. Some projects, for
example in health services, have encouraged employers to redesign
jobs to change work organisation and skill utilisation in order to
address employee retention problems and improve operational
efficacy.
John Buchanan of the Workplace Research Centre at Sydney
University has been involved in a number of the projects. He
explains that in Queensland "many projects took the form of
partnerships between training providers and local industry". A good
example is the Gold Coast boat-building industry, which needed to
attract and train more young workers if the industry was to
survive. He warns however that the Queensland experience shows that
"it's difficult to pursue workforce development for its own sake.
The good ones embedded workforce development within industry
development."
It is an approach that Hall argues replaces the traditional
focus on training provision designed simply to satisfy immediate
employer skill needs. Skill formation is too important to be left
to the chaos of the market, he says, but employers cannot be
alienated. The skills ecosystem approach generates solutions to
real problems in individual workplaces within a wider supportive
infrastructure intent on regional economic sustainability.
Australia has many of the same policy intentions and subsequent
challenges as Scotland. Its response to those problems is beginning
to attract the attention of the World Bank and ILO. It is an
approach that Scotland might also want to investigate.
Professor Chris Warhurst
Professor of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of
Sydney (previously Director of the Scottish Centre for
Employment Research at Strathclyde University).
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