This article by John Kavanagh was published in The Times Network Executive on 8 March 2001.
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A transfer system for IT staff is being looked at as just one idea for easing skills shortages by a national body that is also proposing vocational degrees and work placement schemes for people who pay for their own training.
The ideas are part of a three-year plan being put to the Government by the e-skills National Training Organisation (NTO), with so many new approaches that the organisation’s chief executive hopes there will be enough successes to put her out of a job within five years.
Karen Price has made her mark quickly and significantly since getting the job just seven months ago, when the e-skills NTO was formed as one of 73 covering different industry sectors.
It was born out of the merger of the long established ITNTO and e-business.nto. This latter body grew out of an NTO which originally covered computer maintenance but expanded to encompass IT services in general, including software. The NTOs work with their member organisations, mostly employers, to put their views to the Government and propose schemes to increase and improve training. They also oversee National Vocational Qualification schemes, but Mrs Price sees these as only part of the big picture.
"Our tasks are to attract people into IT, to ensure qualification and training programmes are right, and to get people from further and higher education programmes more work-ready," she says. "It’s very difficult to get employers to invest in long-term development of a skills pool when their priority is to get a particular skill by next Monday. We want to change short-termism and develop a more strategic approach."
The proposed transfer system is part of this aim. Employers would get bank loans to fund training — and if an employee moved on before the loan was repaid, the new employer would take on the outstanding balance. Some companies’ employment contracts already demand that staff repay training costs if they leave within a specified time after a course — and some have taken employees to court in the past.
The NTO proposals also include improved work placement schemes for university students and a new placement scheme for people who fund their own training. This could start in the spring.
The NTO will encourage such people into courses in the first place by working with learning and skills councils, which are being set up in April to replace training and enterprise councils — and with £6.2 billion of funding for courses, across all sectors.
One proposal is already taking firm shape. Two-year vocational degrees are being developed with employers, and ten universities have got funding to start pilot courses next autumn.
"The curriculum is designed to fast-track people through with the skills that employers want," says Mrs Price. "We want to overcome the current mismatch, caused by the time needed to develop a degree and then get students through it." People will get a qualification and a job, or they will be able to transfer to a full degree course.There is also encouraging interest from industry. Big employers are getting involved through new forums: the NTO has set up an IT industry board, bringing together senior directors of IT companies; a businesses board of IT directors; and a board covering end-users.
Mrs Price’s main hope now is that the Government will put the NTO on a more stable financial footing than what she calls the "hand to mouth" existence of the past.
If the Government responds positively to the three-year plan, she could soon be preparing for the early retirement she hopes for.