Alliance of Sector Skills Councils Employer Conference

On Monday 16^th March I attended the Alliance of Sector Skills Councils Employer Conference held at Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh. All sector skills were represented and I joined the Lifelong Learning table. This sector covers community learning, FE/HE, Libraries, archives and information services and work based learning. The morning was taken up with the views of politicians and government agencies. Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning gave a short presentation in which she spoke about the 16+ Learning Choice proposals and then reviewed government actions since the launch of the Skills for Scotland document in October 2007.

This was followed by short presentations by senior staff from the Scottish Qualifications Authority, the Scottish Funding Council, Skills Development Scotland and Jobcentre Plus. Points emerging included the need to invest in skills development in times of recession while Mark Batho, of the Scottish Funding Council, raised a lot of interest by calling for the revival of sandwich courses which as well as being beneficial to students create good university links with employers. It might also be an opportunity for students to practise IL skills learned from IL training programmes.

This was followed by a cross party panel of members of the Scottish Parliament although unfortunately there was no one to represent the Scottish National Party.  Most of the time went to answering questions from the floor. There was much discussion about whether skills training should be sector specific or generic although no general view emerged. There was also a feeling that there is an overemphasis on youth training at the expense of older people. I attempted to raise IL within the context of employability skills training but the politicians did not seem very interested.

Rather more productive was the afternoon session at which each skill group had a general discussion. Identifying learning demand and the difficulty employers themselves have in identifying training needs was a key theme echoing the findings of David Gibbons- Wood at Robert Gordon University. Robust, accurate data is needed to plan training.  Currently too much market information is anecdotal. As there seemed to be an interest in information issues I reported on our work with Inverclyde Libraries in incorporating IL training into their employability training programmes.  Overall a useful day and it was helpful to learn something about the problems of particular skill sectors. Having established contact with the Lifelong learning sector I think we are now firmly in their loop. Although the politicians did not seem very interested in IL the Lifelong learning sector clearly is.  Our advocacy policy in general is to target the people who speak to the people who make the decisions and starting off at a technical rather than a political level seems the best way forward.

RSA Exploratory Seminar on Developing Work on Education and Skills

John and I recently attended an RSA in Scotland (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) seminar in Edinburgh to identify ways in which RSA Scotland and Fellows can make a contribution in the field of Education and Skills in Scotland. A topic close to our hearts and we were not disappointed by the contributions and discussion which took place nor the excellent chairing of the event by Louise Macdonald.

Objectives of the seminar included:

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  Understand the context: within schools/colleges the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence and the RSA’s Opening Minds Project and, more widely, the need to enhance skills for individuals of all ages to meet their needs and the changing needs of employers.


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  Identify and list areas where RSA Scotland and Fellows could make a contribution at local or national level.


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  Establish priority areas for action and consider how these can best be tackled by RSA Scotland and Fellows.

It was interesting to learn of the Opening Minds Project in England with its five key competences: learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information which are developed in the classroom through a mixture of instruction and practical experience. It reminded me of the Curriculum for Excellence 4 capacities: successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens. Managing information was what we understand as information literacy:

Students should have:

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  Developed a range of techniques for accessing, evaluating and differentiating information and have learned how to analyse, synthesise and apply them


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  Understood the importance of reflecting and applying critical judgement, and have learned how to do so.

It was also interesting to hear about the Curriculum for Excellence Health and Wellbeing draft Experiences and Outcomes. Hillary Hall a Development Officer involved in writing the draft outcomes and experiences highlighted the ‘Planning for Choices and Changes’ element which involves skills and using available information.

Throughout my learning I am supported in preparing for significant changes in my life by:

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   developing strategies which help me meet challenges, manage change and build my resilience


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  reflect regularly on my strengths and skills, to help me plan my next steps


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   raising my expectations, developing my potential and recognising and celebrating my achievements


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  using available information, advice and guidance to help me make informed choices and develop personal planning.

The above reflects the work Ian McCracken at Govan High School has beeing doing with a school wide initiative to identify skills that pupils will need not just at school but for life and a common definiton and understanding of what these are. This also reflects the work we are doing with Skills Development Scotland (Career Scotland section) on Information literacy skills and career self-management.

The RSA has drawn up an Education Charter which sets out the principles they believe should inform future development of education for young people, in which they include all kinds of learning, whether formal or informal, and whether offered by schools, college, universities, training organisations or elsewhere. Again much of their work is aligned and resonates with the work we are doing.

Visit to Robert Gordon University Business School

On Tuesday 17^th February Christine and I went to Aberdeen to visit David Gibbons - Wood, a senior lecturer in the Business School at Robert Gordon University who has obtained over £400,000 in European funding to run training programmes for SMEs in the Aberdeen area. So far he has enrolled 20 businesses that are providing 70 participants although he wants 175 people in total.  He is offering 12 courses in ‘bite sized chunks’. There will be an online forum to identify what learners want to do. However a blended learning approach will be used as wholly online delivery is unlikely to be successful. He is finding that individuals are more motivated than organisations which tend to focus on short term objectives.  He has been interviewing representatives of local SMEs. A lack of time available for training was the most cited problem in developing business skills in the organisation followed by a lack of money. From the list of subjects proposed the most popular was Marketing, followed by Finance, Enterprise Skills, leadership and E –Business.  This is interesting information for those interested in information usage in the workplace as marketing has fairly obvious possibilities. However there are clearly going to be problems of uptake with any form of training.

David had not previously given much thought to a role for information literacy in workplace training but he is interested now. There will be more feedback from his work in due course which should be very useful and we will continue to collaborate.

For more information about the project see the Business Skills for Growth website 

Scottish Government's Skills utilisation literature review

I have been reading the recently published Skills utilisation literature review, a report by CFE for the Education Analytical Services, Lifelong Learning Research, Scottish Government (Executive summary and full text vailable at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2008/12/15114643/0)

which aims ‘to bring together evidence on the topic of skills utilisation to provide a clear picture of the nature and extent of the current evidence base’.  Naturally I read it from an information literacy perspective and therefore found it somewhat disappointing as the extensive list of references has nothing about information although there are a couple of useful education references. Although the researchers interrogated a range of databases Library and Information Science Abstracts was not among them. However there are some useful lessons for us.  

The occasion of the report is the lack of evidence of a ‘conclusive and causal correlation between increased investment and skills and increased productivity’. (p.1) Attention is therefore moving away from simple skills acquisition to how skills are actually used in the workplace i.e. – skills acquisition which is defined as:

'Skills utilisation is about ensuring the most effective application of skills in the workplace to maximise performance through the interplay of a number of key agents (e.g. employers, employees, learning providers and the state) and the use of a range of HR, management and working practices. Effective skills utilisation seeks to match the use of skills to business demands/needs.' (p.2)

The last sentence seems particularly important although what we have been finding out suggests that businesses are not very sure themselves about what training they need. The study reports that both Scotland and Wales invest proportionately more in training in the workplace than England although this is not reflected in productivity (p.14). ‘Policy development needs to be linked to business need rather than simply trying to increase the number of people gaining qualifications’. (p.15).

The Scottish Skills Strategy has two main aims:

·         Skills must be acquired

·         Skills must be effectively utilised in the workplace in order to improve productivity  (p.18)

The report identifies three approaches to Skills Utilisation: (pp.2-5)

1.      the market driven workplace approach which focuses on individual workplaces

2.      The state driven workplace approach in which the state takes the lead

3.      The holistic approach in which the state collaborates with a range of agencies

However the report finds that substantive evaluation of these approaches or evidence of direct impact on productivity is lacking and that, not surprisingly, the large organisation is most important. Such findings are not encouraging for a country of SMEs.

On p.6 the report notes:

‘The evidence identifies a link between skills utilisation and a range of workplace matters such as employee motivation, job design, employee participation, equality issues, collective agreement and well being.’

While this may not be the most original observation in the world it does highlight points which have to be borne in mind when promoting information literacy in the workplace.

Pp.75-76 offer the most relevant quotes for information literacy:

Marchington and Wilkinson (2005) argue that the management of learning and transfer of knowledge have been shown to have a major effect on skills utilisation. If the learning fails to be integrated into wider business practices, it will become a barrier to the utilisation of new skills.

Ahlgren et al. (2007) identified good practice in workplace learning and found managers had an important role in the following practices:

• Promotion of open communication and encouragement of informal and social forms of learning


• Encouragement of employees' ability to learn and to bring new knowledge, skills and experience into the workplace


• Welcome new knowledge and found it applicable in the workplace

Some food for thought perhaps

Scottish Funding Council ICT conference

On  Tuesday 9^th December Christine and I attended a Scottish Funding Council (SFC) ICT conference in Edinburgh at the invitation of the SFC Senior Policy Officer for Strategic Development, this being an outcome of the meeting we had attended at SFC on 27^th November. The aim of the meeting was to bring together people in FE and HE with employers to discuss how FE and HE can support eskills training. We had never met such a group before but it was soon apparent that the employer representatives were well known to SFC staff and had a good record in supporting eskills development and were therefore not necessarily typical of employers as a whole and indeed one of them remarked. “We are untypical because we are here” and a lack of employer vision proved to be one of the themes of the day.

There were two introductory keynote presentations which included such points as the growing number of businesses using IT, and the need for IT staff to focus on the needs of their employers. The need to focus on the generation which did not grow up with the Internet was emphasised and our old and highly relevant friends, soft skills development, including problem solving were mentioned.

Much of the rest of the day was taken up with discussion and feedback sessions. Our study of information usage in the workplace and our round of meetings, following on from it, suggested that the public sector is a promising area and that getting the message over to Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SME’s) is the biggest problem.  This and similar issues surfaced - how do you target the right people in organisations? ; SMEs don’t look ahead and plan for the future. Timing, mode of delivery and length of training were all discussed. The need to find out what companies want is crucial as universities often don’t do this. Also mentioned is the need to involve the Scottish Trades Union Congress and particularly its learning representatives who, as we learned from our meeting with the STUC’s Everyday Skills Committee on Tuesday 25^th November, have an excellent grasp of workplace training needs. Significantly nobody from the STUC had been invited to attend. Suggested solutions included an annual event where people from SMEs could meet university staff, which sounds like a good opportunity for IL advocates.

After the first discussion session feedback included developing employability skills and improving course content. Increasing funding training weighted in favour of SMEs was also mentioned.

In the discussions there was quite a lot of criticism of the teaching of IT in schools which was felt to be out of date, boring and lacking in relevance to pupils. This, in turn, raises a major policy issue: the absence of any University input to Curriculum for Excellence planning. While this is a big issue it suggests that our Framework which links secondary and tertiary education is quite pioneering. 

After lunch there were short presentations by several participants who included Christine Sinclair, the executive director of the Institute of Business at Adam Smith College. They work actively with schools in developing the Curriculum for Excellence and also have an advisory board of employers who have, inter alia, urged the need for more soft skills training.

Finally we were invited to suggest a training area into which the SFC might put money and asked to break up into groups to discuss it. Our group spent a lot of time discussing the developing of targeted training for SMEs which would have be funded by SFC since SMEs obviously won’t do it themselves. We all agreed that market research was needed to find out what SMEs want and appropriate mode of delivery is essential whether online, face to face or mentor mediated. An administrative structure would need to be put in place to make it work effectively.

Overall it was a useful day with the main message being that the promotion of eskills and IL training face similar problems