Imagine There's No Colleges?

I'm not sure John Lennon had this in mind when he wrote Imagine.

I've had a couple of meetings with clients over the last few days and there seems to be a theme occurring. Now, these are SME trades businesses, who are the working heart of the construction sector. They have tried to embrace the apprenticeship route with varying success but the message they send to me is the same. "We're not sure we want to do this anymore."

Now, that's disappointing to say the least as we need new people into the sector and the most recognised way of helping them to get the skills is through apprenticeships. If we don't get them in then the potential outcome is not good really, is it?

There main beefs with the current process is time. The time it takes to get people qualified and the time it takes to support them on site, being the main time. This all costs and takes time and value out of the project and limiting their profits. They find working with colleges difficult and feel that the requirement for Maths and English holds people back and eventually drives them away from the apprenticeship, leaving them with a nice warm feeling, which is a bit like wetting yourself in a dark suit. You get the feeling but nobody really notices!

A couple of days ago, I commented on a post relating to education and that it was that which led the economy and not business. My argument was that business should lead and education should provide business with the raw material (people) that it needs. The Government wants to drive growth but the very basics of doing this mitigates against it achieving that. We suffer from an approach that is hundreds of years old, based on academia which businesses today, don't always need. The fact that the Government also sees business as an "easy hit (upcoming changes to NI being and example of that)" then growth is anything but assured isn't it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti academia, I'm just saying that it should be for those people who want to follow that route but the vast majority of people want to have a good job, get paid well, afford to live in a nice house, have a family and a nice car. You don't always need academia to do that. You need the attitudes and behaviours to want to learn, but that need not include Maths and English as two examples of academia. If you can set a fire under people then they will learn anything you want to teach them.

This got me thinking about how we should be going about supporting and incentivising businesses to achieve this desired growth.

The fact of the matter is that it takes too long to get people through apprenticeships. I've always said that progress should be at the speed of the individual and not at the speed of the standard or qualification, or indeed the fact that the college decrees the timescale, when they will take apprentices in etc. This hampers business and that really needs to change.

In one of the discussions yesterday I asked one of the clients what they did with complaints. Did they ever get a complaint where the complainant asked them which college their staff member who, had made the error, had been trained at, as the complainant wanted to complain to it? I am sure you can guess the answer to this.

The simple fact is that the employer takes all the risk and responsibility of employing people and this is the case whether you're in construction or not. This begs the question of why do we need colleges? At the end of the day, we have standards which are only delivered by colleges and not always designed by them. If we have those and people understand what those are and train people to meet those then why do they need to go to college?

Ah, but how would you assess the capability of the individual, I hear you ask? Simple really, employers would have access to an OSAT approved assessor who could confer capability on the individual. In fact many college tutors (who I've just made redundant) could be re-employed to do this. They could also take an activity based approach to conferring capability and I'll explain what I mean by this.

I'll use plastering as an example. Let's break this down into the two main activities which are boarding and skimming. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that an apprentice could spend say 3 months just boarding. At they end of that time they could be assessed and qualified as a boarder. That means that the individual could be charged out and paid as a qualified person for that task. You can then move onto skimming and do the same again. Potentially in 6 months as an employer you could have a trained qualified plasterer who is a valuable addition to your business.

No doubt, some of you will scream "foul" at this suggestion, but the sector cannot continue to operate as it does being hamstrung by education because it can't provide the skill sets or knowledge in the time the business needs to have it.

Imagine there's no colleges, it's easy if you try - maybe John Lennon got it right after all.....