Building up a Healthy Balance on Your Skills Account

Amongst all the reports of a credit crisis, a crisis in banking, a crisis in high street finances and other Defcom2-type warnings, there is yet another crisis lurking in the background that has greater long-term implications for the future of UK PLC - a skills crisis.

Lord Leitch's 2006 final report into the 'Review of Skills', commissioned by the government in 2004, acknowledged that there is a problem. But it failed to provide any real, workable recommendations to individual sectors. Instead it focused on providing continued support and funding for generic training schemes that have very little impact on industry-specific areas such as IT.

The latest initiative to be piloted is the ubiquitous 'Skills Accounts', which the government hopes will encourage the British workforce to retrain and develop skills throughout their working lives. The principle driving force is to stop people bouncing between short-term employment which does nothing to increase their skills base. A Skills Account aims to provide:

• A funding voucher
• Careers advice services
• A secure online record of learning

As the initiative gains momentum, other benefits and services will be added, including a CV builder, a 'Skills Health Check', a statement of learning and employer access to view a learner's skills and qualifications. The initiative has been a joint-departmental development between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. It is the result of recommendations from the original Leitch report and from the Committee of Public Accounts 13th report, 'Sustainable Employment: Supporting people to stay in work and advance'. Whether it has any positive impact in the encouragement of skills development within the workforce remains to be seen.

There are fundamental flaws within the Leitch report in particular, and they are issues that Karl Parkinson, MD of Computeach, sees as major stumbling blocks to the success of the initiative. "The Government needs to recognise that different industries require different solutions to skills shortages," he says. Although the Skills Accounts approach may be a workable solution within industries such as manufacturing, public service or other low to medium skill level industries, for the more high-tech industries such as IT, it has its drawbacks.

The structure of the Skills Accounts scheme is very similar to the 'Train to Gain' scheme, which has seen considerable success in recent months. The success has been restricted, though, to industries such as plumbing, electrical and joinery, but has no relevance for those training in IT. The qualifications offered had no direct relation to software-specific skills development, for example. The concern is that the Skills Account will follow the same, narrow path, excluding one of the most important growth industries in the UK, namely IT.

The Skills Account carrot is the training voucher, which will enable learners to gain a grant towards skills development and retraining. But again, these vouchers will only cover certain types of training, leaving those wishing to develop IT skills holding an invoice for their college fees and having to find the funding for themselves without government help. "The IT sector is in desperate need of skilled workers, yet in order to fulfil the number of positions available, people need encouragement to transfer from other areas of the workforce," says Karl Parkinson. "If the Government is unwilling to subsidise or fund private training schemes which specialise in providing industry recognised vendor qualifications such as the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer through distance and e-learning, then people will be disadvantaged.

And therein lies the fundamental problem. Yes, the Government is recognising that retraining and skills development is vital to keep the workforce at the cutting edge of a modern marketplace and yes, there will always be a need for plumbers. But in a modern, technology-driven age, there is a desperate need for highly trained IT experts as well. The hope is that the government will realise this and that Skills Accounts when launched proper involves vendor qualifications. The UK has the potential to become the 'Silicon Valley' of Europe, but training initiatives must embrace the right qualifications and flexible learning methods such as e-learning if new entrants to IT have any chance of maintaining a healthy 'Skills Account' in the future.