16 January 2004

Thirty years ago, when my daughter was 16 and just about to leave her summer holiday job selling jewellery at a large Coventry store and go back to school to do A-levels preparatory to university, the personnel manager called her in to the office. "What are your plans, Sue?" "I want to go to university and read English". "And then what?" "I think I would like go into personnel work". "Why don't you join us now?"

After a lot of soul-searching on our part, our daugher's part and a desperate plea to resist the offer from her head of department at school, she decided to enter the world of work. For six months she was general dog's body -- coffee-maker, typist, filing clerk, general messenger and so forth; by 19 she was an assistant personnel manager, by 21 she was deputy personnel manager, and in that year, when the personnel manager was taken ill and rushed into hospital, she took over the job for the next few months. Within weeks she found herself recruiting university graduates who were three or four years older than she was. Sadly, she was even having to giving redundancy interviews to long-serving employees, because the type of city centre store which employed her was going out of fashion and losing money. By the time her boss had recuperated and was back at work, my daughter was then recruited by a far larger company. She now runs her own consultancy.

So I was in error, really, when, in my posting 258. The big protective practice of modern life, I had written " .... while the government is ramming so many young people through university and giving them useless degrees, it is no wonder that employers wait until then before hiring them." Many employers, such as my daughter's 30 years ago, were already not waiting, just as they're not waiting now. Indeed, it would seem that the practice is now growing -- at least in England -- where we now have so many second- and third-rate universities giving out what are pejoratively termed, though not entirely inaccurately, Mickey Mouse degrees in a variety of plausible modern-sounding topics which have actually nothing to do with real-life skills.

Thus, if many employers -- mainly in the service industries -- are not looking for formal qualifications any longer, what are they looking for? According to at least one group of researchers as described below, employers are selecting recruits on the basis of confidence, appearance and articulacy rather than paper qualifications. In short, they are looking for the same sort of qualities that are associated with the middle-class (or with the working class a century ago) -- families in which there is a sufficiency of conversation, respect for scholarship and experience, and in which parents imbue a degree of self-responsibility and self-motivation in their children.

So the state educational philosophy and policies are not only badly failing with respect to enthusing enough of the most intelligent students to go into science and engineering -- still badly needed -- and generally despising and neglecting many of the middle skills such as electrical, plumbing, and carpentry -- that we are also badly short of -- they have been seriously failing in the very area which was hoped to give the young people those qualifications that are supposed to be the essence of the new post-industrial age -- flexibility and versatility.

It is still the case, new post-industrial age or not, that most jobs don't require what educationists think they do. The old fashioned personal and social skills will do fine. Unfortunately -- but it's a fact of brain development -- if young people haven't acquired these sorts of skills by the age of 14 or 15 then it is likely they never will. But this is still what a lot of employers are still looking for, and if they could recruit at the age of 14 or 15 then they'd be delighted to do so. But this is not only legally impossible these days, it has also become politically impossible for them even to mention this for fear of being attacked as wanting to hire cheap labour.

However, the following article suggests that the tide is turning at long last. When this is joined by even larger numbers of children truanting from school, even more state schools being vandalised or burned down, even more physical attacks on state school teachers by parents and children, even more overstressed and demoralised state school-teachers leaving the profession early, and even more graduates leaving universities with large debts, worthless degrees and only jobs such as postmen, shop assistants, prison warders and geriatric nursery attendants available to them, then the penny will start to drop that the whole state philosophy of education of the past 50 years has been disastrously wrong. By treating education as some sort of economic game with big pay-offs for the nation-state, and expanding the universities as though they were manufacturing units -- and then having to run them at the cheapest possible cost -- modern governments have found themselves with a great morass where there should have been millions of young people eager to learn well beyond the age of puberty -- as they are now doing in China and India today.

Keith Hudson

<<<<

WHAT'S IT WORTH?

The government thinks more higher education means more social mobility. It's wrong

The belief that more education will make Britain more meritocratic and shrivel the class system lies behind the huge expansion in higher education of the past two decades and the government's determination to steer half the country's 18-30-year-olds into universities. The idea that we live in a "knowledge economy" has strengthened that notion. But recent research casts doubt on it. Education plays a smaller role in social mobility than it used to, according to research which looked at the relationship of people's education to their careers in the early 1970s and early 1990s.

Why should the impact of education on social mobility be declining? Because, according to a forthcoming paper by three academics at Nuffield College, Oxford, employers are becoming less interested in educational qualifications. ("Education, Employers and Class Mobility", by Michelle Jackson, John Goldthorpe and Colin Mills, to be published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility [Elsevier].)That's happening for two reasons. Part of the job of higher education is to send a signal to employers -- that someone has learnt to think, to persevere, to absorb information and to present ideas. As the supply of graduates grows, and the quality of teaching in Britain's shabby, crowded universities declines, this signal is fading. At the same time, services have been growing at the expense of manufacturing, and, increasingly, the qualities that employers in the service sector want are those the middle classes acquire at home articulacy, confidence and smartness.

To test their hypothesis that employers pay little attention to educational qualifications, the Oxford researchers analysed 5,000 recruitment advertisements and interviewed people doing the hiring. Firms, they discovered, want recruits with skills that formal education does not necessarily bring "high touch" in the jargon, rather than hi-tech. Typical examples are management jobs in fast-growing industries such as leisure and retailing, as well as posts in public relations, in sales and customer care.

Employers themselves say much the same thing. "What our members want is office and personal skills rather than more advanced education," says Matthew Knowles, policy adviser at the British Chambers of Commerce, a group for small and medium-sized businesses. "You see a lot of people from university who take three to six months to pick up the skills for an office job. They could do that by the age of 19 and start moving up. Instead they spend three years at college and then take a job they would have taken anyway."

Financial-services employers echo those views. Bruce Collins, chief executive of Tullett Liberty, a City broker, admits non-graduates to his graduate trainee scheme. "We want inter-personal skills, awareness, attitude, eagerness to learn are they rounded individuals? What's their social life?" he says. "They've got to come across well, not just talk the numbers but build relationships." The result, he explains, is a workforce where a "guy with an O-level in woodwork sits next to a guy with a PhD in mathematics".

Marks & Spencer whittles down the 6,000 annual applicants for its 200 graduate trainee places entirely through tests of literacy, numeracy, reasoning and personality. This big retailer takes no account at all of the class or subject of degree, or the university attended.

All that chimes with the Oxford research, which showed formal qualifications featuring in only a quarter of the advertisements in the sample, typically for top-level jobs. In the "sales and personal service" category, less than 10 stipulated educational qualifications. What these posts did require were skills in communication and team-working, and personal attributes such as "good appearance", "good manners", "character" and "presence". Bad luck, then, for those who come across as tongue-tied, crass or nervous, regardless of their academic achievements.

Assuming, reasonably, that job adverts reflect what employers really want, this neatly explains why education matters less than the believers in meritocracy expected. "If you are selling high-value things like real estate, you will be interacting with middle-class people and you will do better if you are familiar with their style, manners etc," says John Goldthorpe, one of the paper's authors. "It's not much use having some graceless anorak, however impressive his or her degree. The attributes that these people have from their family background have some real commercial use. It's not nepotism. Employers know what they want."

Mike Hill, of Prospects, a state-funded career service, says "universities are encouraging people to develop just these skills -- to speak in a businesslike way, to make small talk." One example is Hull University, where a popular module in "career skills", includes "the world of work", time management and how to talk in a business environment. Great stuff -- but not necessarily worth spending three years at university and running up many thousands of pounds in debt.

The Economist -- 17 January 2004

>>>>