It was one and a half years ago that Lord Leitch issued his clarion call to the HR profession and published one of the most seminal workforce reports in years - World Class Skills, a blueprint for meeting the needs of a skilled economy in 2020. Against a backdrop of chronic underperformance (it revealed that some 35% of the workforce are 'low skilled') it set out a vision for reversing decades of underinvestment by drawing up a demanding set of targets. Among the headlines were ambitions to boost the number of degree-level employees from 29% of the population to 40%; increase functional numeracy and literacy from 79% to 95%; and ensure 90% of the labour market are skilled to GCSE level or vocational equivalents (level-2 status).
Spending commitment
What it spawned was a commitment from the Government to spend more than £1 billion annually to launch a funded training project, Train to Gain, and to ask employers to sign a Skills Pledge to guarantee every employee would be trained up to level-2 standard.
Each £1 billion spent on skills would yield a £2.5 billion return to the UK economy, according to the Government mathematicians. But one and a half years on, what is the true story of the skills landscape? Is money being spent in the right place, and are employers truly getting what they want?
The outlook does not look good. According to the CIPD, 53% of businesses say their learning and development strategies remain to be influenced by the Government's post-Leitch agenda - despite the fact that business regularly bemoans the lack of appropriate skills. One problem is that the vast majority of employers (66%) still believe it is the responsibility of government to educate school-leavers up to a basic level-2 (five good GCSEs) standard. All of which makes Leitch's most recent comments on his report particularly irritating to employers. In May 2008, when he was back in front of the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, he said: "It doesn't seem right that the state should invest dramatically more (in skills than it currently does). I think there is a significant opportunity for employers to co-invest in improving the qualifications of the workforce."
British companies already invest more than £33 billion per year training employees to be able to do their jobs. In tighter economic times, when training budgets could well suffer the chop, whether they accept Leitch's view that they must invest even greater sums of money must surely be a moot point.
THE SKILLS PLEDGE
Employers continue to lament the lack of skills as the single issue that will most affect their competitiveness in the next few years. And the scale of the problem is worrying: in its annual Talent Shortage Survey 2008 Manpower revealed that one in eight (12%) of more than 2,000 employers said they were finding it difficult to hire the staff they need due to a lack of skills. The CBI, however, found that more than half (53%) of employers say they cannot find enough people with the skills they need to grow their businesses. It found that two-fifths had concerns about basic literacy and numeracy skills, with 40% of employers saying this had an impact on customer service and 34% saying it contributed to lower productivity.
But while employers may be moaning about skills, they also seem slow to do anything about it. It took more than six months for the first 150 employers to sign up to the Skills Pledge, and, as of April 2008, just 1,300 organisations have committed to it. While the optimistic view is that this covers 3.3 million employees, it represents just one in 10 businesses. Only 305 London-based businesses had signed up by April 2008, while in the same month a survey by the CIPD found that only 13% of CIPD members had committed themselves to the pledge.
