I have met Sarah Babb from the Skills Framework once before and I was very impressed with her insight into skills development. I think I am actually more impressed with her ability to be recognised as an expert in the features pages of all the important national and weekly news publication.
Sarah wrote a column for the Skills Portal last week on the reasons why skills development exists and why the current framework is perhaps not working out.
A national qualifications framework (NQF) exists to "facilitate access to and to be able to award nationally registered qualifications, and unit standards." However, Babb notes that "11 years down the line, we see a perception of little demand for the registered national qualifications and in some instances, a dramatic decline in uptake of certain qualifications."
Some of the reasons for this perception and low uptake are:
- Outdated and/ or poorly written standards and qualifications,
- On-the-job training is providing ample skills development and there is no demand for a national qualification
- Constraints in acquiring national qualifications – ie. the assessment process, lack of registered assessors, lack of accredited training providers
- Lack of status of the qualification
She explains each reason in more detail in the article.
It does highlight the challenge that many companies face when it comes to measuring the skills development element in their own scorecard. There is little doubt that the targets (and the new scorecard is not going to lower that target of 3% of payroll - we've seen it), are high. If the 3% was to be spent on formal training then you'd never have employees in the office, they'd be out training all day, every day. I think that the only way you will make up these points is to quantify and continuously assess the on-the-job training that happens in your company. We are working on a tool that helps in this assessment. We'll post it on our website when it's done.
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