Realising Impact: Making a difference through adult learning
Keynote Speaker: Michael Davis, UKCES
Transcript of presentation given 11th September 2015
So thank you and thank you to David for inviting me. So some of you will know the Commission for Employment and Skills, but I guess many of you won't. So I just thought, very quickly - and of course I am going to stand under my own slides if I stand there - so just very quickly what does the commission do? It's probably easier to think about the commission more and less about the name, the things that we do.
We do an awful lot of research about labour market trends, about skills needs, employment needs, skills changes, skills gaps and those are just an example of some of the things that we have been doing over the last 12 months.
We manage a programme called, Investors in People, which works with about 14,000 businesses across the UK. It helps them get the best possible alignment between their people practices and their business goals. Perhaps less well known is we manage something called National Occupational Standards which underpin, in the UK, the apprenticeship frameworks and many of the vocational programmes that both young people and adults participate in.But really what defines the commission and makes it unique is how it's put together.
So it's a non-departmental public body but it's the leadership that comes from our commissioners who are very senior business leaders, trade unionists and people from the third sector. We've got a couple of vacancies on there at the minute, but normally we have someone both from higher education and further education. It's that combined leadership model; the expertise that they bring, the advocacy for in essence an agenda which is that as an economy grows then it does so through the strengths and the capabilities and engagement of people. It does that best when it does it collaboratively in key sectors of the economy and in key localities.
Now I'm conscious that you've had a couple of days together now and I'm the last of the speech, so I'm hoping to keep this relatively light and engaging. Actually I'm going to start by telling you that tomorrow I go on holiday. So I'm kind of halfway out. I know this is being recorded, so I'm going to say it really, really quietly. It's probably my favourite holiday of the year because it's the one I go away with my friends and we go away for a week on the motorbike. We don't take our other halves with us and kids don't come with you. It's pretty much just great fun.
Sometimes we go round Europe and this year we're going to Wales. But this time last year it wasn't so fun and it's because as you get older, the motorbikes that you own get more and more complicated and the things that you used to be able to do when you were 18, 19 and 20, you seem to have forgotten how to do. So the worst thing was about a week before we were due to go, I started the motorbike, which is pretty much all I do with it, all year round.
On came this light, which I didn't know what it meant, but it didn't look healthy. So I took it to the local garage. They were absolutely fantastic, it was one week before I'm due to go away. I spend my week down here in London. I said; just fix it. Not only did they fix it, they returned it back to my house on the Friday night, cleaned, fuelled and for me to leave on the Saturday morning at five o'clock. So as far as I was concerned I was very, very happy, until I made the mistake of telling my friends who I go away with, who are all, unfortunately, engineers and from the automotive sector about what had gone wrong with it.
So their first horror was why hadn't I fixed it? Well I didn't have time and I can't any more. Secondly - and this is the more substance of the - what I would like us to think about in terms of the future of work and how jobs and so on is - their frustration was why did the mechanic or the technician, why did he just simply - why did he replace the broken part on the bike rather than repair it.
Now without boring you, which it would be utterly boring to tell you what was specifically wrong with the motorbike, there are a few lessons that came out of that example for me.
The first was he didn't repair the part that had broken, he replaced it. He replaced it because it's simply easier to put a warranty on a part than it is labour. If it had taken him more than an hour to repair the part it was cheaper to replace the part, because an hour of his time with the overhead that goes with the garage makes it more expensive. It's just simply cheaper to replace the part.
Ultimately, because he was now following a set of instructions which, actually that little light meant that all he did was he plugged the motorbike into a computer. The motorbike told him exactly what was wrong with it. Told him the part number, actually it didn't tell him the part number to order, because the moment he had plugged it in the part number had been ordered through the data system. All he had to do was replace the part.
Now I think there's some really, really important things and they're the sort of trends that almost move along imperceptibly on a day-today basis but they're having big, big implications in terms of how our labour market works and the roles that people have.
So the first one for me was that he, in my mind, was being de-skilled. So he probably absolutely had the skill and capability to repair that part, but the business model that he worked within said; it's just simply cheaper, easier, safer to replace that part and that's what he did. The diagnostic that was in the motorbike told him that that's what he needed to do.
So for me there's an issue about individual skills' value of a person becoming separated from them as a unit of lab our and that if individuals aren't clear about what their value add is they find themselves just being a unit of labour and the value have been done somewhere else. The value was the fact that the motorbike had the ability to diagnose its own fault and to say what it needed to be replaced.
But the second thing is that there was some new jobs being created, which is that when you hand over your motorbike in the slightly sort of stressed form but they give you a lovely cup of coffee, you hand over lots of information about the motorbike.
You hand over its age. You hand over how few miles you've actually done on it. You hand over the fact that you're clearly middle-aged and you bought a sports bike and it's some sort of crisis. Really what someone else is now doing is collecting all that data up and rather than this being a motorcycle part that failed because of excessive use, it failed because of a lack of use.
Again without going into the mechanics of how the motorbike works, if all I keep doing is starting the motorbike up for 10 minutes just to check it works but never ride it anywhere, you get the build-up of deposits and dirt in the engine. So the part was failing because it wasn't being used rather than the motorbike ever getting up to temperature and being used. So there's someone else who can literally work anywhere in the world who collects up the diagnostics of all of those part failures, and actually I own a motorbike that it's an optional extra for it to start. You have to pay more for that. So someone is collecting that data up and there a new job has been created.
So this was the first thing really, it was a report that we published in January 2014 and it just starts to look at some of the trends, the big trends that are going on in terms of the world of work. So the impacts of technology so that you look under the bonnet of your car, or actually most of us don't even bother and they make it pretty difficult that you're not supposed to. You see more and more technology, more and more electronics are going into the car. The emergence of data, there's things that we can analyse that we never thought possible.
I didn't see it on TV last night and I guess you all didn't because you were here at a dinner. But Channel 4 has got their new programme called Hunted. I saw briefly this morning David Abraham who is the Chief Executive of Channel 4 and he was explaining to understanding how this programme is put together.
So this is about people trying to fall off the grid and disappear. Is that it doesn't matter if you think right today I'm going to just run away today. I'll leave my mobile phone here I won't take my Oyster card. I'll borrow some cash off Mark and I'll just disappear. Because they'll go straight to your house and they already know the patterns of where you've been last and they can work out an algorithm as to where it is that you are most likely to go next.
So we've already got these huge, huge patterns of data that are more and more able for us and will have an impact on the job roles that we create.
So then it comes onto the question of so what are the - so if that is the - if you almost like the glacial shift in work because of things like technology and other factors then what are the implications that in terms of the skills sets that we look for, for individuals?
Now many of you in this room will be familiar with a phrase that perhaps is less common than it used to be. We always used to talk about the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic. If you go back a little bit you can find that that phrase was first coined by an MP in the Victorian era, Sir William Curtis, in 1827. He termed the phrase, reading, writing and arithmetic. If any of you have read the second industrial age, the authors of that book said; actually that just wasn't like a British phenomenon of reading, writing and arithmetic. You could find it as a basis of all modern education systems that we wanted people to be able to read, we wanted them to be able to write and we needed them to be able to add up.
So he thought, well why on earth was it that that term was so prevalent across so much of the educated world in the 1800s and 1900s. Of course it was because of the British Empire. It was well what are the three things that you need to run a really, really big empire? Well you need people to be able to write because they need to be able to communicate to one another. You need the other person to be able to read what the other person has written and you need them to be able to add up.
It feels like those are the skills sets that we still look for in individuals and of course they are, really, really important. But the problem is that technology is really, really good at doing those exactly same three things. So that doesn't feel so good as a person and again it's not a plug for Channel 4, honestly, it's just the other programme I watched was if any of you saw Humans, which was about the synthetic people that were then living in the household. It's quite eerie as to some of the roles that were envisaged for them.
So you then start to think about what are the things that actually technology can't do. What are the things that people are really, really good at. Again from that Second Machine Age, the three things that they identified was that firstly, actually one of the things that people are really good at and technology is not so good at is the ability to assimilate information and form pattern recognition.
So just go back to reading, writing and arithmetic. How on earth did you finish that up to being the three Rs? How would you have programmed a computer to have figured out that reading, writing and arithmetic could be called the three Rs? It's only a human condition that can pattern form and assimilate that sort of thing. So that is something that is unique to humans and should be something that we should see key in our education.
The second is the ability to ask questions. Computers can ask questions if you've told them what questions to ask, but they're not very good at forming the question that you would like to have asked in the first place. Thirdly is the ability of people to collaborate in ever more diverse forums. Just looking around the room and seeing all the different national flags, that ability to work in different groups with different types of people also seems a hugely important aspect for individuals to be able to have.
Then I think for those of you who are responsible for developing curricula qualifications and assessment, my only slight worry is that I worry too much that, or perhaps too often, that our assessment methodologies still feel much more comfortable with the reading, the writing and the arithmetic . We like actually doing assessment methodologies that have closed loops in them. Nothing easier than if the answer can only be a, b, c, or d and then educating people to learn to do a, b, c, or d and actually it's very easy to assess and it gives a certainty of marketing.
The problem is those are exactly the same things that again technology finds the easiest to do. Those three skills that I'd identified are actually incredibly difficult to assess and very, very difficult to design curricula around. Yet those are the sorts of things that we are needing to be able to equip individuals with. So, in other words that they are better able to work with technology that becomes all [evasive], that they collaborate and connect to work with other people confidently. That as individuals they've got that greater personal responsibility.
So if you like number one then is let's just think about the trends. Number two is what are the skills sets, then the third one, because it as a topic that I know that you've been talking a lot about over the last day or so was the whole issue about measurement. Let me just offer you just something that is very pertinent in the UK at the minute, which is the whole debate around productivity.
Now it's a bit harsh on a Friday afternoon to try to do a bit of macroeconomics. I know so bear with me on this. Because this is the really the single, simplest way to think about why do people get so worried about productivity. So remember, just productivity is you take the output, take it at a company level, take it at a national level and you divide it amongst the people that you employ and that gets you roughly productivity, or in businesses they tend to call it value add per employee.
Over here what you've got is, if you like, time zero and what you're seeing in those charts is how productivity grew in the UK from the bottom of each recessionary point. So Eighties, Nineties, late 2000s which is the one that we've just gone through and I could put on pretty much all recessions since the turn of the 1900s. What people have got really exercised about in the context of the UK is that even in high unemployment periods of the Eighties and the Nineties, for those people that were still in work they still were more productive year-on-year, quarter-on-quarter in terms of what they did. But it wasn't the case in the 2000s and that's become the real productivity challenge.
That yes, it's been great that we managed to hold on to such high rates of employment but those people in work have simply not become more productive and indeed at some points our productivity has got worse.
Now to connect this back this is an issue for me about measurement. Because if we are really honest, and for those of you that studied economics, we know some of the reasons as to why that's been going on. But actually we don't know quite a bit and so it's genuinely called a productivity puzzle. In the UK the UK government actually just recently started a review of how we do that big macroeconomic measurement. Because it comes back to some of the things that we've been talking about earlier on. It's some of the things that we value and we want to measure are intangible and they are just very difficult to measure in terms of how we think about measurement at a macroeconomic level.
Now, Alison, who's one of my colleagues is in the room and she told me I am not allowed to do this slide. I'll do it just a tiny, little bit. So this was an article in The Financial Times in February 2014; I am someone who reads The Financial Times and The Economist and anything that they say must be true. So they - and - and they took this from the Office for National Statistics so it must be doubly true. They said that drugs and sex, basically contribute £10 billion to the UK economy.