Career Development

 

  Skilling The feature



Future choices

 
     Stronger enterprise base in UK
 
     Greater global competitiveness
 
     Higher employment, lower unemployment
 
     Less skills shortages à lower inflation
 
     Greater social equity à less exclusion
 
     Higher standard of living

 

Priority skills challenges

 
    Major adult skills shortages and gaps
 
     Literacy and numeracy – basic skills
 
    Generic, transferable skills for employability
 
    Mathematical competence – whole workforce
 
    Broad Intermediate skills – esp. Levels 3 and 4
 
     Specialist ICT skills

 

Engaging employers

 
   New labour market information system
 
    Strengthened Sector Skills Councils
 
    Skills Foresight programmes at local level
 
    Provider out-reach and communication
 
    Urgent ICT campaigns and skills programmes
 
    Training & best practice on work organisation
 
    Training & development for managers

    

Work – the new classroom

 
    Major promotion of lifelong learning
 
    Responsibility shared – employer, employee, state
 
    Information, advice, guidance, training for firms
 
    Funding regime more learner/demand centered
 
    Local workforce development plans by LSCs
 
    Local employer learning networks – for SMEs
 
    Out-reach & peripatetic provision in employers


 

Motivating adult learners

 
    Learning evangelism’ not the answer
 
    Acknowledge system, not individual, failure
 
    Measure and disseminate the returns to learning
 
    Promotion must be very personal and local
 
    Campaign/s from peers and exemplars
 
    Learning in/near the workplace
 
    Qualifications an important motivator
 
    Funding an important but secondary issue

 

     

Flexible learning

 
    Importance of informal and personal learning
 
    Flexible by time, pace, place and learning style
 
    Particularly at or near the workplace
 
    Bite-size – but appropriately!
 
    Unitized qualifications – mix and match capacity
 
    Certification at any point
 
    Wide range of subject areas, including IT
 
    ‘Embedded’ basic skills – where possible
 
    Fastest growing area of learning
 
    On-demand capability – workplace availability
 
    Potential as community resource
 
    New standards required before full exploitation
 
    Internet and interactive TV growth supportive - but
 
    Danger of digital divide
 
    Will it simply reach the converted?

 

Learning methods

 
    Key skills dependent on learning processes
 
    Competence & knowledge based learning likewise
 
    On-line learning – opportunities & challenges
 
    New developments in brain science
 
    New institute for learning methods needed
 
    Local innovation & development essential
 
    Best practice sharing locally, regionally, globally