Employability skills and vocational education and training policy in Australia: An analysis of employer association agendas

Abstract

Employer associations currently urge further change to Australia's publicly funded vocational education and training (VET) system. An important, new focus is 'employability skills' -employers' preferences regarding employee values, attitudes, personality and other personal qualities. Critical technical skill shortages do exist, in both traditional and emerging sectors, and others loom. In part, these flow from employers' own strategies, in particular their declining commitment to employment security and employee training. The paper examines employer associations' agendas for national policy regarding VET structure and funding and explains why associations have recently intensified their efforts in this area. We find particularly unpersuasive employer associations' urgings that the VET system create employees who embody their particular understandings of 'employability skills'. In adopting the concept of employability skills, associations have signalled a further decline in employers' responsibility for VET while expecting to retain the dominant influence over its content, delivery and assessment through publicly funded schemes.The human resource management (HRM) function is both centrally concerned with, and reliant upon, the supply of skilled labour to organizations. The role of the formal, publicly funded vocational education and training (VET) system in skill formation is, therefore, a key public policy issue that impacts upon HRM, shaping its contribution to organizational effectiveness. Australia's VET system has undergone great change since the 1980s, much of it the consequence of intense employer association advocacy and policy involvement. As a result, The authors have together published extensively on employers, employer association and employment relations policy. They co-edited and largely co-wrote Employer associations and industrial relations change: Catalysts or captives? (1999) and, between 1999 and 2003, co-authored the annual 'Employer matters' article for the Journal of Industrial Relations. They also publish in the areas of work and family policy, public sector employment relations and employment relations history.

Employees’ skills, manufacturing flexibility and performance: a structural equation modelling applied to the automotive industry

“…In addition to gaining specific technical skills, employees are increasingly expected to develop various 'generic' or 'transferable' skills (Sheldon and Thornwaite 2005), characterised by a wide application across several employment contexts and are considered to be key issues for flexible and multi-skilled workforce (Keep and Payne 2004). As a result, the approach adopted in this paper aims to go beyond the traditional view of employees' skills, in line with more recent perspectives, including not only the knowledge skills and abilities of the workforce toward a greater variety of tasks, such as ability to perform multiple tasks, but also a range of 'soft', interpersonal capabilities that may be considered as behaviour, attitudes, or personal characteristics, rather than 'skills' in the traditional view, emphasising on issues such as employees' capacity to work in teams inside or/and between departments, to apply knowledge across different contexts, or to embrace change and learning, among others.…”

Immigration policy and market institutions in liberal market economies

“…Poaching became a cyclical phenomenon that led to market failures; the prospect of trained workers leaving for other firms lowered the incentive for employers to invest in skills development. Much of the training initiatives maintained by employers were specific to their own operations and not readily transferable (Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Committee, 2003: 42–44, 181–182; Sheldon and Thornthwaite, 2005: 408–414).…”

“…Workers employed on a casual basis were significantly less likely than those on permanent contracts to receive structured training. The growth of casual employment diminished employer responsibilities for training, as well as workers' sense of commitment to their employers during buoyant periods in the job market (Sheldon and Thornthwaite, 2005: 405). Furthermore, declining permanent employment led to an erosion of internal labour markets, with employers relying more on external labour markets and poaching workers from other firms to fill job vacancies (Lewis, 2008: 4).…”

Meeting skills needs in a market-based training system: a study of employer perceptions and responses to training challenges in the Australian transport and logistics industry

“…Public training institutions were no longer privileged training providers and were forced to compete with privately owned RTOs for trainees and government subsidies. There has been some suggestion that these government subsidies and incentives significantly influence the behaviour of market actors, particularly private RTOs who in some cases design training programmes to specifically take advantage of government funding (Schofield 2000;Sheldon and Thornthwaite 2005;Smith 2003). For employers, flexibility of training options and price for training services became major factors in their choice of a training provider (Smith and Hayton 1999).…”