So what kind of qualifications do employers want?    Well, for an excellent recent analysis, try the paper on "Market Failure in Skills" from Professor Ewart Keep, the first in a promising new “Catalyst” series from the Sector Skills Development Agency (SSDA).

Professsor Keep has no doubts.    "We need to be very cautious about using qualifications as the main or indeed sole proxy for skills . . . It is clear many employers do not share the passion for qualifications that is a hallmark of national policy makers' thinking about vocational education and training."    Nicely understated.

Each NVQ emphasises a particular narrow subset of vocational skills;   perhaps employers want something else:   basic skills, like literacy and numeracy, or the kind of people or "go-get-'em" skills that neither NVQs nor traditional academic qualifications really offer.

Take the latest qualification on offer, an "A-level standard qualifications" in "lottery retail skills" being developed by NCFE, in conjunction with Camelot, also mentioned in FE Focus.    Yes, selling skills are valuable, and should be encouraged.    But will such a narrowly-defined qualification really help?

To quote Professor Keep again, "there are doubts whether many of the skills that employers need, particularly generic skills such as team working, can easily be acquired through classroom learning".    Or traditional distance learning, for that matter.

Trouble is, "over the past 20 years the main focus for increasing workforce qualifications has shifted away from training conducted by employers towards education primarily financed by the state and conducted in FE & HE.    In other words, education has come to substitute for skill formation activity that employers are deemed loath to supply.    In essence, this expansion has been seen to act as a substitute for the creation of a large scale, high quality work-based route for initial vocational education and training."

Even worse, "the more the state intervenes, the less able are the market's own self-correcting mechanisms to function."    So government intervention breeds on itself;   the more you do, the more is needed.

And there’s more.    "The achievement of such targets may increase our stock of human capital and have a positive impact on productivity.    It can also lead to substantial levels of mismatch and over-qualification.    For example, the 2nd Skills Survey, using its own data and that from earlier surveys, showed that among 20-60 year old employees, the proportion holding qualifications at levels higher that those needed to obtain their current job were 29% in 1986, 33% in 1992 and 37% in 2001.    These figures suggest that increasing skill supply and skill stocks may look good in international comparison, but we need to ask how we ensure that these are the skills that are needed and that get used."    Good stuff.

Source:   Market Failure in Skills