What role does higher education have to play in closing the skills gap? Have our universities, colleges and business schools failed to produce the skilled people that UK business needs? What must be done to put the situation right?
Bill Rammell, the universities minister, believes that “higher education has a fundamentally important role to play in helping us to up-skill to the highest level.” But exactly what that role should be is still open to debate.
One frequently asked question is whether the UK’s higher education system is failing in terms of quantity or of quality. Is the skills gap the result of universities not producing enough graduates, or the wrong kinds of graduates with the wrong skills?
Karen Price, CEO of E-skills UK, the skills council for the IT and telecoms sector, is emphatic that numbers are the problem. The IT sector is growing five times faster than the economy as a whole, but the uptake of IT-related degrees has almost halved in the last five years. “There is an urgent need to improve the quality and relevance of IT-related education,” she says.
Others have different views. There are plenty of graduates entering the labour market, says Professor Ian Hipkin, director of the MBA programme at the University of Exeter. However, “young graduates do not have the experience or the ready practical and conceptual skills. Employers find a great gap between what students are learning, and what they can actually do when they enter the workplace.”
Tim Ambler, a senior fellow at London Business School and a former executive with a global company, agrees that quality is an issue. “Education is failing in terms of mental discipline, application and the 3Rs,” he says.
Many in the business world criticise academia and claim the skills it teaches are not relevant. But academics respond by pointing out that business has a poor understanding of what higher education actually does. “The business community seems to want graduates to join them armed with a set of techniques that can provide instant solutions to management and business problems,” says Prof Hipkin. “This is not foremost the function of a university. Broader problem-solving abilities are what universities are best at encouraging.”
Professor Chris Rowley of Cass Business School agrees. Businesses “often take a self-interested and overly narrow view of the purpose of higher education,” he says.
The recruitment and training policies of businesses also come under fire. Mr Ambler lays at least some of the blame for the skills shortage at the feet of senior managers, who themselves often lack key skills. “The business community is excessively complacent and fails to recognise the enemy within,” he says. “For example, how many directors can coherently explain where their company’s cash flow comes from? And why?”
Professor Malcolm Warner of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge believes that human resource departments often fail to adequately define and describe the capabilities and skills they are looking for. If a company complains that graduates lack interpersonal skills, he asks, is this because of a defect in the education system, or in the company’s selection processes?
“Many jobs are over-specified,” he says. “By definition, it is hard to find suitable applicants if you are asking for too much initially and unwilling to conduct in-house training.” And while companies complain about the lack of qualified graduates, “there are, on the other hand, some graduates with specialist vocationally-geared qualifications who cannot find employment”.
The government does not escape criticism either. Professor Bruce Campbell of Queen’s University, Belfast believes that “most students are not coming to university to acquire skills. They are coming to get the best possible degree for the least possible effort”.
Prof Campbell blames this on an education system that is excessively geared to performance targets and league tables, in which universities and students alike are deterred from taking risks. “People are encouraged to do only what has been done before,” he says. In turn, this stifles important skills in areas such as creativity and innovation.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Rammell does not share the criticism of league tables. But he does believe that university education needs to provide generic skills that will stand graduates in good stead in later life, and not just qualifications that will enable to them to get a first job. He also believes that university education is an important factor in enabling learning. “All the evidence is that you will learn more if you have a university degree than if you do not,” he says.
The solution, he says, is increased dialogue between businesses and universities. There needs to be more “genuine business-facing” on the part of the universities. At the same time, he believes that “we need a coherent view from businesses as to what their education and training needs are”. Part of the mission of the sector skills councils is to bring the two sides together and help this dialogue to take place.
Some universities take the same view. Professor Tim Wilson, vice-chancellor of the University of Hertfordshire, believes that the education and business communities need to come together to understand each other’s needs. “It is out of such collaborative discussions that we can work out how to add value to their organisation,” he says.
Hertfordshire’s business support agency, Exemplas, plays an important role in helping the university stay in touch with the business community. “Every single course we teach is designed with the help of employers and professional bodies,” says Prof Wilson. “I want our graduates to be sought after by employers for their business-relevant skills. As well as bringing technical competence, graduates need to add value to their organisation through team-working, critical thinking, speaking and listening, problem-solving, leadership and creativity. These are the competencies that determine success.”
Professor Jonathan Gosling, director of the University of Exeter’s Centre for Leadership Studies, agrees. “There is now a much greater recognition of the need for students to integrate their real-life learning with the new cognitive concepts,” he says. Exeter now offers leadership training modules to every undergraduate, no matter what discipline they are in. “By 2008, every Exeter graduate should have had some leadership and team-work training,” he says.
At the postgraduate level, Prof Hipkin says the MBA programme is also evolving towards a more integrated and practice-oriented approach. “This gives the opportunity for students to apply what they learn on the programme to their own current business and managerial challenges,” he says.
There is clearly still much room for improvement on both sides. Prof Warner thinks employers need to be more creative, and seek to employ graduates with a wider range of backgrounds. Mr Ambler believes that “too many academics teach what they themselves have learned as distinct from what their students need.” Prof Hipkin has a warning for both sides: “Universities and business schools certainly need to be concerned with the needs of employers. But at the same time, business leaders should recognise that higher education is good at ‘general’ education, not creating technical or functional specialists.”
It seems that the best hope of progress is for the two parties to keep talking to each other, each recognising what the other is good at and what each can bring to the table. Until that understanding can be achieved, prospects for closing the skills gap look less than favourable.
