Futureskills Scotland Expert Briefing: Public Policy, Training and skill Formation - Challenging Some Current Myths

The purpose of the Expert Briefings Series is to make available to our colleagues in Scotland the knowledge and experience of people who are expert in their fields. The series covers issues concerning the labour market, education and training and their links to the economy.

Each briefing involves an invited expert providing a personal briefing to an invited audience under Chatham House Rules and the publication of the briefing paper. In providing this service, Futureskills Scotland is pursuing two of its aims:

• to improve the availability, quality and consistency of labour market information; and
• to analyse the Scottish labour market to inform policy making.

The views expressed in the briefing papers are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Futureskills Scotland.

David Ashton draws upon his wealth of experience and detailed knowledge to present a challenging analysis of public policy in the field of training and skills formation. He rightly recognises that many businesses provide training for staff; these businesses are aware of the benefits from investment in training and skill formation amongst their workforce. However, he also identifies the difficulties in generalising from this result to cover companies which do not provide such training.

Professor Ashton pinpoints a popular myth that all training is good and more training is always better in all companies.
He suggests that the common belief that public policy should be based simply on encouraging more employers to train more workers more often, springs from this mythical base. His paper quickly gets to the nub of the issue: Why do some companies provide training whilst others do not?

He suggests that answering this question requires a deeper understanding of the drivers of training in firms. Professor Ashton contends that any company’s demand for skilled workers and the opportunity it affords workers to acquire these skills depends on two things:

• the products and services which the company offers (its product market strategy); allied to
• how work is organised within the company.

Professor Ashton’s analysis encourages us to think about more than the supply of skills alone. His analysis emphasises the importance and interplay between the demand, supply and usage of skills within individual companies.

Following this crucial insight, he turns his attention to training and skills formation in smaller companies. Small
businesses offer fewer formal training opportunities to their workers than do other businesses. However, Professor Ashton argues persuasively that in such smaller companies, informal training is often more appropriate and relevant. However, formal training is easier to measure and capture. Our understanding of training and skill formation in small companies is therefore hampered by underestimation of the role of informal training.

His analysis also brings into question the perceived superiority or efficiency of formalised training as opposed to informal training. He highlights that larger companies operate on a more formal basis than smaller companies. In very small companies, especially those where an owner/manager has principal responsibility and knows most/all of the staff, informal approaches to training may be both most appropriate and most effective.

Professor Ashton argues that on-the-job training is often more effective in increasing performance than formalised training carried out away from the place of work. However, he also recognises the importance of certification of skills for individuals in allowing them to progress in the wider labour market. Under these circumstances, the employer’s view and that of the individual worker need not correspond.

The paper concludes with some thoughts for policy makers on potential ways to improve the effective delivery of skills into the workplace. The key points amongst these are

• A recognition of the drivers of effective skills (demand, supply and usage)
• A questioning of the perceived superiority of formal training in increasing performance
• he need to understand the operational conditions under which small firms operate and how these manifest themselves in terms of training opportunities for workers in these firms

Professor Ashton makes an argument for a more sophisticated understanding of the delivery of effective skills formation in the workplace. Such an understanding could lead to more targeted public intervention in supporting improved performance amongst companies. His paper is a welcome addition to the ongoing skills debate in Scotland.

David Ashton is Emeritus Professor at the University of Leicester and Honorary Professor at the University of Cardiff. He worked in the engineering industry before entering academic life at the University of Reading. He subsequently moved to the University of Leicester where he established the Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS)in the late 1980s. CLMS become one of the leading centres for research in training and skills and delivered HR Masters degrees via distance learning to training managers across the globe.

He is currently involved in research into the skill strategies of multi-national corporations and how these impact on national education and training systems and also into the relationship between workplace learning, work organisation and performance.

He has written, co-authored and co-edited 15 books and  has provided consultancy services in the field of training and human resource development to a range of private sector companies and public bodies such as the CBI and CIPD. He has also acted as consultant to a wide range of government departments in the UK, including the Cabinet Office, Department of Trade Industry, Department for Education and Skills and the Sector Skills Development Agency. Overseas he has provided consultancy services for a number of government agencies in countries such as South African, Singapore and Malta as well as various sections of the European Union. At the international level he has provided consultancy services in the area of workplace learning and workforce development for the International Labour Organisation and the World Bank.

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