2014 is all about recruiting skilled professionals

2013 was the year to shout about job creation. It saw sector employers pledging jobs and work experience, and highlighted the importance of tourism and the visitor economy as a job creator and critical player in the UK economy. Currently, the sector employs one in five of the working population and by 2020 it is projected to need a further 1.7m people.

This week the latest unemployment figures showed a drop of 7.1 percent and all the statistics show that it has never been easier for sector employers to recruit. Looking at the latest Hospitality Employment Index, which we produce jointly with Caterer.com, it shows that there are currently 21 people applying for each advertised role on Caterer.com, an increase from 19 applications per job last year. This is a far cry from the situation ten years ago where the ratio was something nearer one applicant for every two jobs. Similarly, the number of employers reporting hard-to-fill vacancies is no worse than that of any other sector, although employers in seasonal and rural areas do find it much harder to recruit.

So given the sector is not finding it particularly difficult to recruit, why is it continuing to make so much noise about job creation?

I think there are a number of reasons for this. The first is that it was one of the few sectors to recruit during the economic downturn and many employers wanted to take the opportunity to show the Government the industry’s size and importance. Another reason is that some employers have made a deliberate decision to recruit jobseekers as part of their corporate social responsibility, so naturally enough they are shouting about their commitment. And all credit to them. This last year we helped 3,500 jobseekers into employment in the sector, and our experience has shown that it can often be easier to recruit elsewhere. Yet most of these employers are passionate that recruiting previously unemployed people is the right thing to do and part of their investment in local communities.  Third, sector employers have used the debate about job creation to try and tackle the persistent, negative perception of careers in the sector.

Going forward however, the challenge a single focus on job creation produces is that it removes the focus from the real problem; recruiting people into skilled jobs.

While the number of employers reporting hard-to-fill vacancies is relatively low, those reporting difficulties finding skilled staff remain higher in our sector than across the economy as a whole. This is likely to get much worse as a third of the new jobs projected to be created in the sector are in higher skilled and management positions.

So if 2013 was the year of shouting about employment potential, let 2014 be about bringing attention to the large number of skilled roles that need to be filled. This means that:

• We need be supporting the further education colleges and making sure that funding cuts don’t hamper their ability to produce quality students that enter the sector
• The sector takes responsibility for its own destiny as part of the apprenticeship reforms and that the changes address those occupations that have skill shortage needs
• There is support for the new centres of excellence that are being created. Already, for the first time in a decade, we will have skilled front of house students going into the hospitality industry (if you haven’t seen the video – you’re missing a treat! Check it out at http://bit.ly/19ovEdI). Other centres of excellence in patisserie and confectionary start soon and we want to see similar ones set up for travel and aviation.
• There is a sensible and constructive debate about how the sector can have a flexible labour force without chronic labour turnover. We currently have one of the highest labour turnover rates of any sector; as a result most training goes on initial teaching and not towards skill gaps.

Undoubtedly the recruitment of people into skilled roles is a more challenging conversation to have, but one that we should not put off as it is critical for the future competitiveness of the tourism and visitor economy sector.

Another year, another qualifications review!

The Whitehead Review into adult vocational qualifications reported earlier this month and, like previous reviews, it seeks to address the impact and relevance of training and reduce the growth of unnecessary qualifications. Why do we have so many qualification reviews and why don’t any of them seem to address the issues they are seeking to resolve?

Qualification reviews come along pretty regularly and most have similar aims to increase:

• The take up of qualifications
• The skills of the workforce and;
• The competiveness of UK plc.

There are two problems around qualifications. First, despite the large take-up of qualifications, skill needs remain stubbornly high. Second, in some areas of the economy qualification take up is low and some people believe this impairs the professionalism of certain occupations or industries.

Looking closer to home, the take up of qualifications across the tourism and visitor economy is low. Ten percent of the workforce has no qualifications and only 42 percent has one at level 3 – the level that the government is increasingly focusing on.

Yet, despite the obsessive focus on qualifications, the link between skills acquisition and qualifications attainment is spurious at best. Qualifications have often been used as a short hand for skills and there are obviously many skilled and experienced people with no qualifications. Similarly, having a qualification doesn’t mean a person is skilled.

Since the introduction of competence-based qualifications in the early 1990s, the focus on training and assessment has largely taken a back seat. It goes without saying that it is the training that leads to a qualification that develops the skills employers are seeking. Equally important, the assessment should be sufficiently robust to test the transfer of knowledge and the use (however limited!) of those skills.

Possessing a qualification itself should tell an employer that someone has the relevant skills. This was the case twenty years ago when employers could name the qualifications and had confidence in them; and as a result, specific qualifications were requested in job advertisements. These days are long gone. The stream of qualification reviews means that many employers do not recognise qualifications because they are not around long enough for employers to get used to them. It’s a sharp contrast to what happens on the European mainland, where employers largely recognise the qualifications because they themselves went through a very similar system.

The latest review, like many of its predecessors, is likely to have very limited impact as it lacks bite and doesn’t really address the core issue of training or assessment. On the contrary, Doug Richard’s review of qualifications is likely to have a greater impact.

The creation of professional standards that are set by industry and reflect what someone in a given occupation should be able to do immediately removes the problem of the myriad of qualifications. For the first time it also puts in-house training on the same status as qualifications. Gone is the obsession with qualifications and getting the inputs right; it doesn’t matter because the output is key and meeting the professional standard. These will be independently assessed to determine whether someone has met the standard, regardless of whether they have undertaken a qualification, an apprenticeship or received in-house training.

There is potential to hope that the incessant monotony of qualification reviews will finally come to an end. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Government’s control of apprenticeship standards through its trailblazer rollout and the lack of autonomy for sectors to put in place a system that reflects their needs will mean that the familiar cycle of qualification reviews will be with us for many years to come.

The ever changing role of the state in addressing sector skills

So the wait is over and the Government has finally announced how it will implement the apprenticeship reforms in England that Doug Richard recommended earlier in the year. Many employers have been on tenterhooks waiting for the announcement as they have the potential to bring huge changes to the way in which employers use apprenticeships and the role that apprenticeships play in addressing skills for our sector. However, to what extent is the sector dependent on the state to address its skill needs? How do the constant changes in government policy affect how skill needs are being addressed and how employers ultimately engage with the skills system?

Let’s look at the facts. The vast majority of employers are not dependent on the publicly funded skills system; in fact, 85 percent of training delivered is informal and in-house, with very little resulting in formal qualifications across the tourism and visitor economy. The smaller the business, the truer this is.

Most apprenticeships in the sector are at level 2 and therefore do not address the increasingly urgent skill shortages and gaps at higher levels. From a funding perspective, with the demise of Train to Gain in England, apprenticeships are largely the only game in town. Last year 38,442 individuals completed apprenticeships in the sector and the vast majority of these were employed by large businesses. Yet despite this take-up, skill shortages (generally at level 3 or above) remain unaddressed.

Research into Train to Gain, which provided funding for people to gain a level two qualification, suggests that it had limited impact on addressing skill needs because it was being delivered to employed people who already had the required skills. Similarly, there is evidence that a significant percentage of apprenticeships are what has been termed ‘dead weight’; meaning that an apprentice receives the same experience and training as they would have done from normal in-house training. The test will be whether employers continue to offer the apprenticeship when Government announces the need for greater financial contribution from employers. Clearly, if an employer sees the benefit of an apprenticeship over in-house training, they should be prepared to pay for it. It’s not clear which way this will go, but it has been suggested that there could be a drop as much as 70 percent in the number of apprenticeships if employer contributions were to be increased. Yet currently the hospitality industry has the highest instances of employers paying for apprenticeships without any government subsidy.

Employers are likely not to engage with the skills system because it is confusing and costs too much. With the increasing focus on transient recruitment, many employers see little point in investing in a staff member through the skills system if they aren’t going to be in post for long.

The confusion in the skills system is ever present, despite several attempts to hide or remove the wiring. But I think the problem is now so much about the amount of wiring and more about the extent to which the system is constantly changing. The skills system has frequently been the victim of attempts to address wider policies such as worklessness, entrance into higher education or low literacy and numeracy levels. Rather than addressing these at source, the wider vocational system becomes distorted trying to address wider issues and ultimately fails in its core role.

It is unsurprising then that many employers increasingly rely on their own solutions, but too often in-house training has been ignored or dismissed in relation to qualifications. This is crazy and creates an artificial divide between the skills system and day-to-day training.

Doug Richard’s recommendations about creating professional standards for key occupations provides a simple way forward that can address this divide. This would mean that employers set common standards that are independently assessed and focus on the knowledge and skills someone needs to perform their job. It then doesn’t matter how someone develops the skills –informally or through qualifications – but the focus shifts to the quality of skills acquired.

However, the Government’s approach to introducing this system is likely to be less than effective, as while the policy is coherent, the implementation is over-engineered and (once again) is likely to miss what the policy is aiming to achieve. We have already seen this with the introduction of traineeships and through the wider employer ownership agenda.

If the Government were to allow employers in different sectors to take real ownership of the skills agenda and let the policy do what it’s designed to, there is a chance that government interventions can help skills . We have to hope for the future, but the past suggests that the skills system may prove too attractive for governments to leave alone.