Skills Recognition Conference 2009

VETAB held the Skills Recognition conference on 25 and 26 May this year - some very interesting discussions around what is RPL and how it should be delivered.
The ultimate aim of placing the focus on RPL is to ensure that the workforce is more innovative and flexible - this is even more important in an economic downturn. World-class skills are needed for building a world-class economy.
In research presented at the conference, it was shown that over 88% of workplaces see informal coaching and in-house training as being the most popular methods of gaining new skills. So - how will we make the link between the reality of informal training and the formality of an external, formal qualifications-style training? This can only happen if informal training is given validity and the process of linking the qualification back to the workplace begins with what is happening in the workplace itself - and NOT with the training package.
It is imperative that we don't allow training to slip onto the back-burner as happened in the previous recession where it took over a decade for training to re-emerge as a vital component of skills development.
Professor Roy Green of UTS spoke about companies who need to build their own momentum for innovation to achieve spectacular growth. He says that Australia has dropped when compared to other OECD countries when it comes to our ability to innovate. He reminded the audience that even in times of depression, great innovations were taking place such as the radio and Hollywood advances. He would like to see a new commitment to a national innovation system that is more than just science and technology - a system driven by collaboration and not silos; a system that includes high and low tech and that is non-linear.
Innovation, he maintains, comes from internal knowledge in the company, interaction with customers, engaged employees, higher productivity and leadership and management skills.
In fact, Green emphasises that good management behaviour is the single most cost-effective way to improve performance in an organisation.
Green wants to see a national forum on the workplace of the future to develop a shared vision and to enable a roadmap for change.
Other speakers emphasised that recognition of skills is a strong business tool. It reduces the time spent on induction and is a faster route to productivity improvements. It helps to identify skills gaps and also provides information for workforce planning. It assists in motivating and retaining staff and also provides the benefits of nationally recognised qualifications.
Interest from companies for RPL remains high where it forms part of normal business practice - you are simply placing an accredited framework around what is being done anyway. It is part and parcel as well of becoming known as an employer of choice.
VET-speak can be a perceived barrier to people taking up RPL and it is really up to the providers to build a more personal approach for candidates.
Margaret Willis, Director of Quality Assurance Services, DET NSW, also spoke about how the uptake of RPL is generally slow as it is seen as inflexible and not well supported by providers. The COAG project now looking at RPL has definitely thrown the spotlight back onto quality recognition. She said that RPL is NOT about tick and flick and not about providing a qualification that is 2nd best.
It should be providing the learner with confidence in life-long learning and there are several models of RPL that need to be investigated for the benefit of the candidate. Nationally, only 4% of candidates have been recognised through RPL and about 10% at Diploma level. RPL is still seen as too costly and too complex.
Brian Spencer in his paper discussed our professional judgement is so important in making assessment decisions. He reminded us that our expectations can shape our outcomes.

Free Business Sales Video on POWER PROSPECTING?! I'm Excited!

What a busy period it has been for us at Management Consultancy International!

We've been recognised with four national awards in the last month including the covetted Australian Learning Innovation Award for 2009 from the Australian Institute of Training Developers for programs we run using LEGO Serious Play.

We've also had a such great response to the launch of our new Business Sales courses that we're celebrating by releasing a free Business Sales training video on POWER PROSPECTING.

Check it out here:

We all know that prospecting is a function upon which sales teams rely for their 'bread and butter' leads, however our experience and research working with organisations domestically and internationally has shown us that sometimes the basics can be missed.

In this video we're focussing on the most important Power Prospecting methods:

• Warm Calling
• Referral Sales
• Executive Networking

Visit our YouTube Channel to check out our other Management videos:
www.youtube.com/mgmtcnsltintl

Managing in tough times

I was at a great lunch last week and listened to Terry Davis, CEO of Coca Cola, talk about his organisation's approach to managing through tough economic times.
Terry maintains that we are nowhere near the bottom of the crisis and at the moment it is still a "rich man's recession". His organisation however is looking at different ways of retaining staff. The cost of retrenching and then re-training is way too high, he says. Often companies retrench first and think later. He prefers to do a full employment review and to rely instead on making structural adjustments and encourage leave to be taken where possible.

Another speaker at the lunch, Joe Hockey, said that the recession is encouraging us to become a more compassionate society. We now need to reach out to others who have been disadvantaged and give them the message of hope that we will all get through this and become a better society.

Winner - AITD Awards 2009

We are beyond excited!! We won the Australian Institute of Training and Development Award last night in the category of Australian Learning Innovation. We won for our "outstanding contribution to the practice of learning and development".
What a huge honour for us to be acknowledged in this way!
Our winning submission was for our LEGO Serious Play team building program at Toll Personnel that led to major changes in the culture of the team and some financial savings for the business.
Initially, when we arrived at the wonderful evening awards ceremony, we were not too confident about our chances...We were up against very strong finalists: Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Deloitte, Hudson Global Resources and American Express. We imagined all the wonderful programs that they had designed for their organisations and felt as though we were in a David vs Goliath type situation. We did not even give much thought to our acceptance speech...
Yet the judges commented that we had demonstrated how we could take a world-renowned methodology and adapt it for Australian business.

LEGO IDEA Conference 31 March 2009

The theme of this year's amazing LEGO IDEA conference was 'play to learn, play to create, play to innovate'. The opening address by LEGO CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp reinforced this theme as he spoke on what is 'systematic creativity'.
He said that LEGO itself is about creativity but there is also a system to it as things need to be put together. There are 1000's of bricks in different colours and shapes and everything is thought through in a very deliberate way.
In order to move organisations forward, you need both the "hard and the soft" - you need to be able to manage the paradoxes of both the emotion as well as the hard stuff. LEGO ensures that we bring both the play and storytelling as well as logical thinking and mathematical structure into problem-solving.
This is why LEGO is so vital in childhood development - we are enabling children to be creative in finding their own solutions. LEGO is as important in the business world as we learn more effectively through fun and play and igniting our inner urge to create.
We learn far better as adults and as children if we create something ourselves and if we become self-directed learners who can transform our understanding of systems.
Playing with LEGO encapsulates the full spectrum of being scientific and at the same time artistic. Sytematic creativity is defined as:
Using logic and reasoning alongside creativity and imagination to generate ideas that are surprising and new.
If we frame things in a positive way, we will see endless possibilities. LEGO means play well and encourages us to deliberately practise systematic creativity. It is an open system with infinite possibilities and becomes in this sense a social tool that fosters collaboration and the establishment of connections.

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson then reinforced this theme as he spoke about how creativity leads us not only to ask how things are done, but also why things are done. Often when we play, we lead ourselves into the 'why' and particularly when things are 3-dimensional we are led to behave differently.
Eliasson who is world renowned for his installations in the TATE modern gallery and in cities all over the world, sees systems as embracing both individuality and collective collaboration.

David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, emphasised the importance of making things in order to become more engaged with the world. People want to make their mark on the world - you see this as staff make their work cubicles uniquely theirs or as people bring up children in a positive way.
People also want to be social and make social connections.
All of this explains the power of LEGO - it is about making things and sharing meaning around what has been made. This is the antithesis of the 'sit back and be told' culture. Playing with LEGO is hands-on and minds-on. It takes away the fear of making mistakes. We don't want to hand solutions to the next generation - we want to give them tools to make them feel part of the world. We want to be able to stimulate their creativity to create a better world.

Mikkel Vahl of LEGO Education reminded us that several years ago MIT University was experiencing a 50% drop-out rate of students in their first year. As soon as the curriculum changed to becoming more hands-on, this drop-out rate came down dramatically.
When we ask people to find solutions themselves, when we ask open-ended questions, we set the stage for innovative possibilities.

Back to Basics Management

What has been very interesting over the past six months is seeing how managers in the variety of organisations we work with have responded to the current economic crisis.

The consistent theme we've noticed is that proactive managers are a returning to the basics; focusing on customers, communicating with staff, setting clear goals, managing expenditure levels and placing emphasis on quality.

Our latest management video describes the six basic skills which managers must focus upon in uncertain times:

1. Communicate and delegate properly ensuring that all employees feel a sense of responsibility for tasks, are given appropriate levels of authority to complete those tasks and are held accountable for outcomes
2. Analyse the Current Situation of your team or organisation
   
3. Set Quality Goals which have been developed
4. Motivate Your Team by creating a sense of challenge and rewarding efforts - not inherent ability
5. Handle Change by responding to alarm with action rather than despair
6. Manage Projects by conducting a thorough planning phase rather than responding to problems as they arise during implementation

When the outlook is bleak, resources are scarce and uncertainty is rife, managers will truly have their mettle tested. Can your organisation's leaders cut it?

Big Skills '09 Conference - Innovation is the new black!

Yesterday I attended the Big Skills '09 conference in Sydney, hosted by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The conference set out to stimulate discussion on skills and training at a strategic level.

My big take-aways:

• The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) changes everything - including our skills strategy
• The jobs that are being lost from our economy as a result of the GFC probably won't return even after our economy recovers
• People are losing their jobs now who only a few years ago would never have considered themselves vulnerable and in need of re-skilling
• Australian enterprises need to treat the GFC as an opportunity to restructure and invest in human capital
• Some industries need to face up to the reality that they won't be around in ten years time
• It is important to develop not only the workforce but also the workplace itself by using collaboration, teams and technology
• We must be careful to not just develop people's skills according to short term need, but ensure people's capacity for learning is boosted - the new skills of adaptability & agility

The other big theme from the conference was the importance of leaders having strong management skills in order to boost and strengthen organisations' ability to innovate. Roy Green, Dean of Business at UTS described how innovation is critical to improving productivity, growth, social inclusivity and environmental sustainability.

It certainly drove home to me the importance of not only the management skills training which I am involved with in ensuring our organisations are productive and innovative but also the innovation programs which we have been rolling out at Management Consultancy International over the last year and a half, including LEGO Serious Play.

Here are my notes from the panel discussion:

Panel: Why Are Skills And Training Important In The Current Economic Climate?

Tony Jones’ Introduction:

• Japanese trade has plummeted nearly 50%, their GDP has also plummeted
• Japan is beginning to look more like its in depression rather than just in recession
• Moving from 'Global Financial Crisis' (GFC) to a 'crisis of globalisation'
• Governments must prepare for large-scale job losses
• In Sydney today we lost 100 or more apprentices - like canaries in mineshaft
• National skills base was in crisis before the GFC!

David Finegold - Dean School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University

• Lowered opportunity costs for investing into training
• Example of Toyota – used opportunities of recessions to improve their workforce and processes so that when demand picks up again
• Develop long term capability
• Green jobs will be more important
• Philip Bullock – Skills Australia
• Govt needs to be thinking how they can make opportunities for businesses to invest
• Businesses which are looking for niche areas

Roy Green – Dean of Faculty of Business, UTS

• In Australia we have moved from periods of complacency to adversity!
• The key priority is a national recognition is that our competitive advantage is our knowledge and ingenuity – this must be put into policy; into a 'skills eco-system'
• Investment / commitment to the innovative capability
• It’s good to have an elegant innovation system instituted but it is what happens in business which is critical – that’s where the rubber meets the road.
• When labour market does pick up again

Mmantsetsa Marope – Senior Education Specialist, World Bank

• Africa's experience is that we must balance the basic skills with a capacity to take up unknown opportunities
• Thinking outside the box to define skills as a specific capacity
• The effects of the GFC - the poor and young will become more marginalised
• Growth with equity is particularly important – mitigating the vulnerability of the potentially weak.
• People who are losing their jobs now would have not thought themselves as vulnerable two years ago!
• Fragility of life and the mercurial nature of planning

David Finegold

• Jobs lost today are likely not going to return once the recession is over
• It is important for our training organisations to be NIMBLE
• Eg – ppl retrenched from recreational vehicle industry being retrained for orthapedic industry where there is long term demand in Indiana, USA
• Singaporean model of creating a skill eco-system
• City-state is more conducive because of geographic concentration
• Government has been far more interventionist
• The balance between the government being a fast-follower and innovator must be found clearly
• The unique thing about this recession is that until we have some sense of faith in the financial system we won’t be able to implement some sort of solution
• Major restructuring of executive re-compensation would have been off the agenda six months ago but it is now part of the agenda
• WA – as mining boom goes down
• Generation y has had it pretty easy – but now it is going to have it rough
• Example is of apprentices in mining industry who were being paid 58k now being offered 18k outside of the industry

The UK's system of “Foundation Degrees”

• Equivalent to the first 2 years of a 3 year full-time degree that leads to honours
• England only at the moment – embedded in educational system
• Set up to facilitate high level skills
• Set up in response to skills shortage
• Many people who never thought that they would be capable of being a part of tertiary education have participated and gone on to completing honours degrees.

Robyn Shreeve – Principle Westminster College London

• UK – large infra-structure projects have been approved in order to counterbalance the reliance on the financial services sector
• UK govt has guaranteed apprenticeships to everyone that wants one
• The Rudd Government, despite their talks of having an education revolution scrapped the innovation program ‘Commercial ready’ – which was designed for companies which were having trouble accessing venture capital.

Patricia Neden - Innovation & Business Skills Australia

• Focus needs to be on promoting companies that are entrepreneurial and innovative which will be emerging in the future
• Emerging ‘Green Economy’ – the great hope for the future?

Debra Rowe - US Partnership For Education For Sustainable Development

• Stop waiting to emerge from the recession/depression and instead use our capacity to recreate global financial systems that work in a way that is good for humanity
• “Economics as if people really matter”
• Make use of research about what quality of life is all about – not just growth
• How do we measure success?
• Not just green jobs – eg solar installers
• All jobs - with new knowledge, skills – for example how to be an “effective change agent”

Is Obama administration serious about the Green Economy?
David Finegold

• Social entrepreneurship – a whole new sector who want to make a difference – find ways which we can help these people make a difference.
• Eg: using franchise systems to combine non-profits & for-profits to distribute medicinal drugs in Africa

New Zealand – National Skills Strategy

• Didn’t just want another supply-side strategy
• Demand side approach – because were not able to make changes to the tertiary educational system
• It is important to get industry to be more intelligent about how they voice what their skills development needs – in a longer term manner
• Some industries need to face up to the reality that they won’t be around in ten years time

What are your thoughts? How will the GFC affect your organisation's skills strategy?