Unlocking the door to career advancement

I occasionally get calls from bemused parents asking why their recently graduated PhD son or daughter is struggling to secure a job offer befitting their years of academic achievements.

No matter how illustrious one’s academic achievements might be, what qualifies you for an offer of a role in the real economy is the skill set you can demonstrate at the time the opportunity arises.

In a sense we are all upskilled daily as we interact with life. Once a role is secured the importance of an employee’s qualification matters less as they develop their skill set – mainly through daily interaction with their job.

Wise employers will invest in the ongoing skills development of staff beyond what they acquire through engaging with their role daily.

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Tech developments

As technological developments reshape our world daily, many roles are superseded by technology or are changed to such an extent that the people involved need to upskill.

Where a job disappears or changes, the employee, regardless of their initial qualification and skill set, may need a complete overhaul or at least a tweaking, prior to them re-entering the world of work.

Given the pace of technological change today education and training should really be seen as lifelong pursuits, extending beyond the mandatory retirement age and throughout one’s active and healthy life.

Embedding this mindset will be a significant challenge. It requires us to understand that skills acquisition is an ongoing, daily process and that the existing formal education system which typically concludes for most learners by their early to mid-20s is but the initial phase of our education and training.

Consequently, we must also restructure our skills provision structures.

Ireland seems to be falling behind many competitor countries in recognising the necessity of investing in lifelong skills acquisition. A recent OECD skills review found that people’s skills have made an important contribution to Ireland’s wellbeing and strong economic performance. It added that skills will continue to be an important driver of continued improvement in the future.

However, it also warned that many Irish adults are at risk of falling behind, lacking the right skills to thrive in their current employment and being ill-prepared for changes in the world of work.

Fortunately we do have scope for expansion in this area. My Irish Times colleague Carl O’Brien recently reported that there is currently a €1.5 billion surplus in the National Training Fund (NTF). Funded by a levy on employers, it has experienced exponential growth due to increased employment and designation of funds as normal expenditure under Government spending restrictions.

The OECD skills review recommended using the €1.5 billion surplus to address these challenges and improve incentives for employers to take advantage of education and training. It also advised the establishment of a discretionary fund as part of the NTF at regional, local and sectoral levels, and for an increase in NTF support for upskilling and reskilling for SMEs.

Disconnect

As someone who is engaged in the management of a number of further education and training (FET) providers, I see a disconnect between what our existing rules and regulations allow our FET colleges to offer prospective students and the type of flexible upskilling offerings that could entice adults to engage with them.

The colleges have an abundance of vocational, technical and practice expertise and experience, making them ideal for offering shorter more focused upskilling and reskilling courses that can be accessed by adults at different stages of their careers.

However, under current arrangements, further education colleges must mirror the structure of the country’s schools in order to validate courses for staffing and funding purposes.

This includes sticking to strict criteria such as running courses from September to May, engaging with learners from 9am-4pm, and providing 20 hours of deliverable content weekly.

The Government’s strategy for further education and training, appropriately called Transforming Learning, outlines the direction in which it wants the system to move.

It emphasises the ambition that FET should be for everyone, regardless of their previous formal education background, and should offer a pathway for lifelong personal advancement.

It envisages a future staffing model for FET which teachers and practitioners work across different settings, delivering a wide range of flexible full-time and part-time courses to meet the changing needs and demands of learners.

To address the findings raised by the OECD skills review on lifelong learning, it is crucial to implement a more flexible model that moves away from the overly rigid focus on full-time provision.

We need to build educational and training structures that align with the realities of the modern world and with the lives of prospective students. This includes prospective students who may work full-time and may be looking for courses that can be delivered in a more flexible, remote or blended way.

Guidance

It is also important to establish publicly funded resources for adults seeking professionally trained career guidance. These structures and resources should provide access to trained experts who can assist clients by conducting assessments to identify personal interests, transferable skills and areas for improvement.

There are currently many websites and services that provide these services, but they are virtually all aimed at school leavers or college graduates or those considering apprenticeships.

There are also many highly skilled guidance counsellors working in the Adult Guidance Service within each Education and Training Board (ETB) structure. But their current remit is to support the most marginalised in society. This is not an appropriate structure to support upskilling the general population.

The need for structures to support the ongoing upskilling needs of our adult population has led to the emergence in recent years of a new profession of ‘life coaching’. As an unregulated industry it is meeting a demand that is not currently provided by the State, but as with all services in high public demand regulation and the application of appropriate standards is essential.