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SPEECH ALAN: I'm talking about skills and utilisation but there are many, many other
themes that have been covered in the skills employment survey.
So the employment issues
go way beyond just skills.
INTERVIEW ALAN: Skills and utilisation is like other forms of underemployment.
It's a situation where workers would like to supply more than actually they
do. All of us spend lots of time learning skills, getting better at what
we do, the government invest a lot of time and resources in education and training. So the
fact that we might actually be under-utilising them is something
that everybody in society should be concerned about minimizing.
What I'm presenting today are the results emerging from the skills
employment survey two thousand and twelve. What's been happening over the last
twenty-five years up until two thousand and six anyway is over qualification, that
is people in jobs switch that are overqualified,
has actually been rising so this is suggesting that we using
resources inefficiently,
But since two thousand and six and the latest survey in two thousand twelve has
suggested for the first time ever over qualifications have fallen
which is suggestive of the fact that we might be using as a society skills more
effectively than we did before.
FRANCIS: Over the past twenty five years the rate participation in training
went on an upward path
until about two thousand and three. It reached a peak about fifteen percent doing some
training over a four week period and then declined slowly
to about thirteen percent which is what it is now.
But that's the participation rate what's been happening at the same time
again
is the duration of training has been reduced
very substantially.
So understanding this change in the volume of training is not something
which we can give a definitive answer for
but there are of number of possible explanations.
The most worrying
explanation
could be
that Britain is on a low skills trajectory and this is reflected in less
training taking place. The second one which is rather less worrying
is the idea that we are now a much more educated workforce.
There are about fifteen percentage points more graduates in the workforce than
there were in the middle of the nineteen nineties and that
as people are more educated it actually may lead less training
later on when in the workforce.
There's certainly less remedial training needed if people are more literate
and further up the scale more educated people
can pick up new skills more efficiently than less educated, they are better learners. Now a third
potential explanation is to do with the efficiency of the training function
and some of the employers we've spoken to have
told us a story which is essentially to do was smarter training that is to
to say that
there
finding that they're able to
focus their training more closely on their companies needs.
Then there's a fourth explanation which is that learning
in the workplace is becoming more divorced from training in the workplace
and people are developing skills, learning
how to do things better without actually quote going on a training course or
even doing on the job training. Now
there's no doubt that happens we see it in qualitative studies but is it
happening in increasing to the extent that they could account for a halving of
the training volume.