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‘Employability’ and the Substance of Soft Skills
Ian Hampson and Anne Junor
University of New South Wales
Industrial Relations Research Centre
Paper prepared for presentation at ILPC 09
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‘Employability’ and the Substance of Soft Skills
Introduction
With an increasing proportion of the workforce employed in the service sector, and with changes in the nature of work, definitional issues around ‘skill’ and ‘competence’have become acute. It is not too strong to write of conceptual disarray in discussions of skill, and, given that the process of defining skill is political, and that employers are uppermost in most developed countries at present, there is danger that employer-dominated ‘top-down’ definitions of skill will prevail. This is important because ‘skill’ is a significant power resource for employees in their dealings with employers, and recent definitional changes embodied in policy prescription and practicedeny ‘real’skills their recognition and undermine the power conferred on employees by the possession of ‘skill’. This is a problem that is particularly important in the service sector.
We are concerned with the notion of ‘soft’ skills. We interrogate this notion because the vocabulary is laden with questionable dualisms – hard (technical, difficult and manly) vs soft (non-technical, easy and feminine). When probed these oppositions do not hold. For the ‘new’ ‘service’ working class, ‘soft’ skills are necessary, but seen as ordinary. Such skills are seen as being required across the full range of service jobs, from retail and hospitality work to financial, business, transport and communications services, through to public, community, health and education services. On the one hand, ‘subtle’ capacities for emotional interaction are assumed to elude the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil: only when exercised by executives are they lauded as ‘emotional intelligence’, and given status and remuneration.On the other, these skills do not appear to be readily available for recruitment from ‘off the street’. For a generation, the proxies of age and gender have been used by employers who have turned, in their quest for service skills, to mature-aged women returning to the labour market after working unpaid in family and community. More recently, employers have demanded that younger recruits from school or university must come ready equipped with the required skills, if they are to be ‘employable’. In both cases, the skills in question are seen as a free gift to employers –components that the employeeis expected to bring ready to ‘plug in’ and ‘switch on’, rather than as ‘skills of experience’, built and applied through workplace practice (Brown et al., 2001).
Our main argument has two parts. The first is that ‘soft’ skills have substance and their valuation is socially constructed. The second is that these skills are currently under-specified, both in terms of their content, and in terms of the level of experiential learning they presuppose.
This paper has four objectives.The first is todocument the conceptual disarray in the definition of ‘skill’, particularly in the service economy that now constitutes over 70 per cent of the labour market. The second is to trace how this disarray has played itself out in Australian training policy. The third is to outline the elements of a general taxonomy, recently developed in New Zealand and designed to assist in the identification of both content and levels of under-recognised service skills. The fourth is to counterpose this new taxonomy of the ‘skills of experience’ with employer-dominated definitions of ‘skill’ and competence in Australia. Space limitations mean we can only make a start at this fourth objective .
We expect that the antipodean experience will be of some international interest because of the way shortcomings in core conceptual equipment can be shown to have worked themselves out in a particular national training system. Many policymakers in a number of countries are wrestling with similar questions: the nature of the ‘skills’ required for a range of jobs, both inside and outside the service sector (Brown et al, 2001; Forfas, 2007). Generic skills are known by different terms in different countries: in the UK as ‘core skills’, ‘key skills’, ‘common skills’, in New Zealand as ‘key competencies’ or ‘essential skills’, in Australia as ‘key competencies’, ‘employability skills’, ‘generic skills’; in the USA as ‘basic skills’, ‘necessary skills’, in France as ‘transferable skills’; in Germany as ‘key qualifications’ (see NCVER, 2003; ACER, 2008: 28). The OECDsubsumes them within a ‘vast agenda’ of ‘lifelong learning’, which ‘covers all purposeful learning activity’ and ‘all forms of formal, non-formal, and informal learning’ (OECD, 2007:10). The OECD is currently exploring the capacity of national – and, indeed, international and Europe-wide – qualifications systems to not only register skills, but to aid in their development and transfer (OECD, 2007). Clearly, the definition of skill is on the agenda internationally.
Australia’s employers have laid out their preferred image of ‘skill’ (ACCI, 2001; ACCI/BCA, 2002). The ‘skilled’ employee – one who possesses ‘employability skills’ – is an enterprising and self-reliant individual, who can be trusted by employers to ‘self manage’ in pursuit of enterprise goals. This is a distinctly ‘Anglo’ concept of skill – individualistic, defined by employers, and not contested by (or embedded in) other social forces. Despite serious conceptual failures, employers have been remarkably successful in building this concept into Australia’s training system. The so-called ‘High Level Review of Training Packages’ (ANTA 2004) accepted that ‘employability skills’ should be incorporated in the competency standards that are the centrepiece of Australia’s training system. And in May 2005, the National Training Quality Council (NTQC) endorsed the incorporation of employability skills into ‘training packages’, and funded Industry Skills Councils (ISCs) to review all existing training packages, modifying competency standards to incorporate ‘employability skills’ as required.[1]This process has posed some problems that have not been properly addressed.
The first part of our paper traces trends in the international literature on skill and competency, arguing that these conceptsare in serious disarray, and this is to the benefit of employers. We qualify this point by noting that when concepts of service skill are under-developed, lack of recognition absolves employers from paying for the skill, and from applying developmental initiatives to it. In this way, politically driven lack of clarity about ‘skill’ can exacerbate skills shortages and undermine career development and staff retention. Section one establishes this conceptual disarray. Section two traces the extension of employer control over ‘skill’ inAustralia’s training system through the advocacy of ‘employability skills’, and points to some consequences. It argues that employers’ ‘top down’ ‘wish list’ approach has generated conceptual confusion and posed implementation difficulties, despite the best efforts of training practitioners.
On the other hand, we do not see the service skills in question as wholly insubstantial – as nothing more than a bid by employers for control over workers’ hearts and minds. The problem for employers is that they actually rely on the humanity, judgment, insight and deftness that workers bring to a range of service jobs (Boltonand Houlihan, 2005). Neither is there any particular novelty in employees’ attempts to claim the value of such skills, nor in unions’ support for such claims (Steinberg, 1990). Section three thereforeoutlines an alternative conceptual framework, the outcome of aService Sector Skills Identification Project (SSSIP), funded by the NZ Government.[2] This project was aimed at ‘shining a spotlight’ on the skills that are most used and least likely to be recognised in a range of service jobs. It was based on research across the public service and public education and health sectorsand its outcome is currently undergoing validation trials in the community sector.This outcome is a framework focusing on three sets of under-specified skills (awareness-shaping, relationship-shaping and coordination),identifiable at five proficiency levels based on workplace learning.In section four we apply this framework in providing a fuller account of three‘employability skills’– ‘communication’, ‘problem-solving’ and ‘teamwork’. As a result of the ‘ground-up’ approach used to derive this framework, we argue that it provides a more coherent account than do employer–defined employability skill lists, of some under-specified skills required to accomplish service work processes.
i) Disarray in the Concepts of‘Soft Skill’ and ‘Competence’
A workable definition of ‘skills’ must steer between the dangers of overextension and under recognition. Overextension – including far too much content within the concept of ‘skill’ – entails the danger of going along with employer-dominated definitions, whose behavioural control elements result in incoherence. Under recognition also works in employers’ favour, as they will not have to pay for skills they do not recognise. Underrecognition removes the possibility of applying developmental processes to skill, and using the latter for career management purposes, and to aid retention – points to which we will return. An effective definition of ‘skill’ must recognise ‘real’ skill, and classify it according to levels of proficiency. Few attempts have been made at this difficult task in regard to so-called ‘soft’ or ‘invisible’ service sector skills.
The concept of ‘skill’ has historically been bound up with contests over power and control, as in labour process theory. Braverman’s rendition of Taylor’s work explicated the latter’s distinction between ‘ordinary management’ – in which employers sought to persuade or cajole employees to exercise their skill on management’s behalf – from ‘scientific management’, in which management would appropriate workers’ production knowledge and skill, and thereby gain control over work (Braverman, 1974). This second concept of skill entailed, in addition to manual dexterity, autonomy and broad conceptual knowledge of the labour process, both acquired through formal training. Possession of skill increased employee bargaining leveragein the workplace, and employability across a number of potential employers (Payne, 2000).
One of the most widely received attempts to conceptualize and operationalise ‘skill’ is that of Spenner (1990). Spenner identifiedtwo broad dimensions of skill, autonomy/control and substantive complexity, this latter involving the level, scope and integration of work with ‘people, data and things’, or the ‘mental, manipulative, and interpersonal tasks’ of a job. The reality of complexity and autonomy is one thing, their recognition and acknowledgement is another. There is a difference between ‘objectively defined competence’ and the recognition of that competence – which is a social and political process. Some jobs may be defined as skilled in the absence of task complexity – and ‘really’ skilled work may not be defined as such (Littler, 1982:9; Attewell, 1990: 437-8). Much feminist scholarship and research has thus demonstrated how the work in female-dominated occupations has tended to be defined as unskilled, even when it entails significant task complexity. And the skills that women deploy at work may be defined as the ‘natural’ attributes of women – and hence undervalued (Game and Pringle, 1983; Cockburn, 1984; Steinberg, 1990; Wajcman, 1991). Thus achieving proper valuation of these skills is largely a function of the political power of occupational communities to achieve acknowledgement. And the issues of what is a ‘skill’ and what is a personal attribute (whether natural or acquired) come up for contestation.
In the international critical literature on skill, especially in ‘Anglo’ countries (eg UK, the US) (Warhurst et al, 2004; Lafer, 2004) two tendencies have been observed: first, a tendency for the concept of ‘skill’ to expand, and second, for the content of the expanded concept of skill to be shaped by employers. The inclusion of personal attributes within the concept of ‘skill’ has become more common. Thus, ‘skill’ has come to include ‘a spectrum of knowledge, capabilities, traits, and attributes – including discipline, and conformity to norms of physical appearance’ (Keep and Mayhew, 1999:10). Employers in the service sector may also require what is termed ‘aesthetic labour’, and the ‘aesthetic skills’ necessary to perform it (Nickson et al, 2001). Aesthetic labour is ‘looking good and sounding right’ – in other words conforming to notions of what a ‘good’ employee should look like, sound like and act, as defined by management. Lafer (2004) thus documents how discipline, cooperation, and compliance (and even freedom from substance abuse problems!) have been defined as ‘skills’, and how the concept of skill is robbed of its former meaning, as something that is a source of power for workers. Lafer (2004:116) argues that the new definitions of skill and competence reveal that ‘employers have become even more ambitious in the extent to which they seek to mould the will and personality of employees … with the employer seeking to control not only their physical labour, but also the thoughts in their heads’. Thus, ‘skill’ threatens to mean nothing more than ‘what employers want’ (Lafer, 2004:117-8). This is the pitfall into which Australia’s employer bodies have fallen, as we document in the next section.
We can see this trend at work in the definitions of ‘skill’, or ‘competence’, that hold sway in the realm of management development, where it is to be expected that employer-oriented definitions of skill would have purchase. The seminal work of McClelland (1973) sought to identify individual factors that could predict job performance. These factors were not skills in the conventional sense, but were a set of behaviours combined with skills, knowledge and personal attributes, which McClelland defined as ‘competencies’. Here, competence is ‘an underlying characteristic of an individual that is causally related to criterion referenced effective and/or superior performance in a job or situation’ (Spencer and Spencer, 1993:9). But this raises the question of exactly what ‘interior characteristics’ are skills, competencies or attributes? Particularly important is the issue of motivation, and here the slide into incoherence commences.
Nordhaug (1993:19) seeks to maintain the common sense division between ‘… employee competencies (defined as knowledge, skills and aptitudes that are relevant for work) on the one hand, and work motivation and commitment on the other’. This allows that a person may be able to perform a task, but not be motivated to do so. But, after conceptually separating these concepts, Nordhaug then recombines them:
The two former elements together constitute the individual employee’s basic ability to perform tasks; what the person is technically or potentially able to do on the job. The latter two are elements of human capital which influence the actual performance of work by reflecting what the individual employee is willing to do on the job (Nordhaug, 1993:20).
In a similar vein, Mayo (2001:88) defines ‘capability’ as that which ‘a person brings that enables them to achieve both their goals and the goals of the organisation’, including not only qualifications and experience, but also attitudes and values. Because Nordhaug (1993:20) also defines motivation and commitment as ‘elements of human capital’, he finds the distinction between attitude and competence impossible to sustain although he tries to do so by arguing that what distinguishes ‘competence’ is the role of learning. But, ‘… all development of competence is inextricably tied to learning, which is here defined as processes that lead to changes in one or more of the following dimensions: knowledge, skills, attitudes and other personality related factors’ (Nordhaug, 1993:34-35, emphasis added). If ‘competence’ is ‘an underlying characteristic of an individual that is causally related to criterion referenced effective and/or superior performance in a job or situation’ (Spencer and Spencer, 1993:9),the distinction between ability and motivation becomes impossible to maintain. For such writers, ‘competence’ includes, not only technical skill and knowledge, but also ‘self-concept’; traits (physical characteristics and consistent responses to situations or information); and motives (Spencer and Spencer, 1993: 9-11).
A subsequent development and very popular version of this line of thinking is Goleman’s (1998) ‘Emotional Intelligence’, which (allegedly) distinguishes superior work performers. For Goleman ‘emotional intelligence’ ‘means managing feelings so that they are expressed appropriately and effectively, enabling people to work together smoothly towards their common goals’ (Goleman, 1998:7). The terms ‘appropriately’ and ‘effectively’ embody corporate value judgements. ‘Emotional competence’ is a learned capability based on emotional intelligence (there is some slippage between the two terms) that results in outstanding performance at work. Emotional competencies cluster into groups, each based on a common underlying emotional intelligence capacity (Goleman, 1998:24-25). There are five ‘clusters’ of emotional competencies: self awareness, motivation, self regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships. Among these ‘emotional competencies’ is ‘commitment’, a main indicator of which is ‘adopting the corporate mission’. ‘Motivation competencies’ are demonstrated by the willingness to work short notice unpaid overtime – to work through weekends, and ‘go the extra mile’. Thus ‘emotional intelligence’ facilitates the construction of individual identity in the image of the organisation.[3]
But, if ‘competence’ is what provides the conditions for superior workplace performance, and ‘competence’ is composed of attributes including motivation, then a person who lacks motivation to perform as management desires can be defined as not simply uncooperative, but as incompetent. The statement ‘I am competent to do x, but I lack the motivation to do so’ is contradictory, because competence entails motivation. Resistance is redefined as incompetence. Through this not-so-subtle conceptual shift, skill and identity are shaped in the image of the corporation. Lack of motivation is individualized, constructed as a personal failure (incompetence), rather than a consequence of bad management.
The literature on transfer of training assigns a central place to motivation as a separate variable affecting transfer (Baldwin and Ford, 1988).The conceptual slippage involved in conflating these concepts is not only sinister in its attempt to specify components of individual identity in the image of the corporation, but it is also drives towards incoherence.
ii) Australia’s Employability Skills Framework
In Australia, the working definition of ‘employability skills’ is ‘skills required not only to gain employment, but also to progress within an enterprise so as to achieve one’s potential and contribute successfully to enterprise strategic directions’ (ACCI, 2002:3). This definition yokes together individual development and conformity to employer requirements, and indeed makes the former contingent on the latter.Since employers control the terms on which employees are engaged and ‘progress within an enterprise’, the definition also amounts to employers’ controlling the content of ‘skill’.