Changes in the Workplace: Different Approaches to Training, Recruitment and Retention

JVET Conference – Wolverhampton 16-18 July 2001

Paper presented at Fourth International Conference 'Vocational Education and Training Research', University of Wolverhampton, 16-18 July 2001

CHANGES IN THE WORKPLACE: DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TRAINING, RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION PRACTICES.

TWO EXAMPLES FROM SPAIN.

Fernando Marhuenda Fluixà

Almudena Navas Saurin

Alicia Ros Garrido

Departament de Didàctica i Organització Escolar

Universitat de València

ABSTRACT.

This paper is based on work being carried under the 5th Framework Programme Research Project FAME contract nº HPSE-CT-1999-00042, entitled 'Vocational identity, flexibility and mobility in the European labour market'.

Our paper will show the analysis of a series of interviews with employers in two key sectors for the regional economy of Comunidad Valenciana, Spain - tourism and health - currently undergoing relevant changes in the occupational roles that have been traditionally profiled. These data will be analysed in the light of current team work done upon occupational identity models provided by Sainsaulieu, Dubar and Carruthers among others.

INTRODUCTION.

Under the framework of the research project ‘Vocational identity, flexibility and mobility in the European labour market - HPSE-CT-1999-00042’ , we have conducted research in two sectors undergoing important changes in the regional labour market. Both are representative for the social and technological developments taking place in local and regional labour markets in Europe nowadays. In this paper, we will report on the interviews we have conducted with employers and human resource managers in those two sectors. They are radiodiagnostic technicians in public hospitals, as well as workers in 4 and 5 star medium size hotels.

Because more fieldwork research is under way within the project mentioned above, we intend to point at relevant issues related to the processes of identity formation of workers with levels of qualification 2 and 3 in those sectors.

The average duration of the interviews was 45 minutes. In the health care sector we have interviewed the doctors in charge of the department of radiography of several hospitals or health centres. The focus of the interviews has been to find out about the company’s or institution’s viewpoint on the relation between those workers in jobs requiring vocational training at the intermediate level of qualification and the work they have to perform daily. The intention is to find out about the appropriateness of their qualifications, competences and skills, level of insertion; as well as on identity issues and satisfaction of the workers and employers, whether they are meeting the expectations of each other and the work to be performed.

Interviews have taken four major issues as the areas around which identity formation processes of workers happen: organisational aspects; factors related to education and training, occupational structure and factors related to work; and how all the previous have an impact upon individuals. The items we tried to address in each of the interviews were the following:

1. Organisational aspects.

-What are the (technological) innovations taking place in the recent past.

-To what extent has the introduction of such technologies and innovations had an effect upon the organisation of work in the company/institution: environment, job rotation, relations with clients and providers, ...

-Organisational changes happening in the sector.

-Persons/departments in charge of the quality management in the company.

-Human resource management in the institution.

-Processes of staff selection and induction into work.

-Relations to vocational education institutions with particular regard to staff recruitment.

-Contract/hiring policy of the institution: typology of contracts used.

1. Factors related to education and training.

-Level of qualification of the workers of the institution.

-Difficulties in finding qualified staff.

-Jobs and kinds of work for which recruitment/retention policies are particularly hard.

-Training policies of the company/institution.

-Training plans of the company being implemented in the present.

-Offer of the company/institution of work placements for apprentices or vocational education students. What assessment produces the company about those persons and their level of qualification, with particular regard to future recruitment.

1. Occupational structure and factors related to work.

-What is expected from workers in the company.

-What are the sources of satisfaction of workers in the institution.

-What are the areas currently under improvement or which should be improved.

-Assessment of the training needs of workers in the institution.

-What are the new occupational profiles in the sector and how are they identified.

-What are the changes in the work requirements and how are those taking place, and who is taking responsibility for such changes.

-What are the possibilities for career development with the different types of training.

THE CASE OF TOURISM.

This is one of the most representative sectors in the Comunidad Valenciana. Despite including very traditional activities highly rooted all around the region, other activities are growing up in the sector more closely linked to the improvement of the quality of the service. These are innovative activities for the approach underlying them (quality hotel, tourist guide, travel agencies, etc.). There is an increasing number of students registering for vocational education in this area, as well as new university degrees being offered on it.

The first issue to take into account is the gender division that is made very clear in all the interviews: hotel service workers are always women, while for restaurants it is men who do the jobs.

Technological innovations are being introduced in order to adapt the different services one may find in any hotel to the modern technologies in western everyday life. This is affecting the areas of computing as well as staff training.

Computing in hotels is producing changes in both internal and external communication systems, facilitating both booking and checking in and out of clients, refurbishing rooms and lounges, equipping them also with modern services for refrigerating and warming the rooms.

Staff training changes every year. If we take the model provided by Sainsaulieu (1995), we could say that the tourist sector is under the frame provided by the ‘fusion’ mode. Managers require from their workers satisfaction with the work they are performing and there are different reward systems (like night rounds for new workers which allow for a quieter pace and thus better conditions for learning than in rushed mornings, and offering fixed contracts for workers in order to keep them in the company and give them stability).

They are all clear that in this sector ambition plays an important role, and vocational education provides the necessary mobility for workers in different companies within the sector. This is the kind of ‘promotional mobility’ which combines socio-professional and vertical mobility. Continuing training provided by the companies together with the growing offer of initial training in the sector contribute to the growth of knowledge generated around it. Vocational education allows all workers (from managers to bellboys) the updating of their knowledge and the possibility to be promoted within the company or in another one.

Within the sector it is a current practice to recruit staff from vocational education students who have satisfactorily performed their work placements within the company.

However, it is widely acknowledged that training is not used as an accreditation of skills. The interviewees expressed the view that in order to perform successfully in the workplace at least 50% of the necessary skills are acquired through experience, the other 50% relying upon education. Yet, it is also reckoned that continuing training is a must in the sector, due to constant reforms in the market which have an effect on work. All of the hotels have valued apprentice placements in the same way: most students show a strong will to learn and to work and they are highly motivated towards work in itself. The interviewees also expressed their preference to recruit young people for their facility to learn how to use new technologies as well as the specific skills of their job.

A negative aspect of placements, however, is the short length of this period. At least 6 months is perceived as the minimum length in order to be able to rotate through the different departments of the hotel and get an appropriate idea of the hotel as a whole. The fusion or community model is the adequate one in order to generate such an understanding of the company as a whole in which each piece is important for the successful achievement of the aim of the company. A sense of involvement and engagement is collective in the sector, shared by the employees in the hotel.

No doubt among employers there is the view that the more educated one person is the more capabilities of being further educated she or he has.

The features of the sector produce what were previously well defined occupational profiles, but nowadays have changed into profiles with cross-cutting skills along all levels of qualification (computing, languages as well as social skills when dealing with the customer). These changes are also being introduced by new management styles as well as by new technologies in the relation to the customer.

There is also the need to generate loyalty among customers as well as among workers. Despite geographic mobility being an intrinsic feature of this sector, and depending upon one’s ambitions and personal aims, the loyalty of the employee has an impact on the company, because the satisfactory attention paid by the company to the customer is based upon the level of personal security of the employees. This is astonishing if we take into account current market trends of ‘brasileanization’ (Beck, 2000): labour markets do not easily accept the kind of contracts often used in the sector nor the kind of relations established among employers and employees – where loyalty is reinforced by personal loyalties through motivation and personal acknowledgement, as well as through satisfying the needs of the customers and workers. Therefore, training needs as well as safe contracts are important policies in order to keep the trends within the sector.

Managers clearly divide two elements in work: professional self-realisation for a well performed job and personal satisfaction, with the latter being the more important of the two factors. Communication, team work and the ability to be assertive in the relation to others are important tools for managers. Also a sense of vocation is a must, as well as professional work, which often requires being attentive to the minimum detail.

THE CASE OF RADIOGIANOSTIC TECHNICIANS.

Health care in Spain is mostly under the public sector, despite privatisation efforts in the past 10 years that are changing this profile. The organisational model of the system makes the medical specialised service the core unit around which all activity is organised. Medical specialisation has grown alongside the introduction of new technologies and the generation of new knowledge. Accreditation and degrees are the base of the organisation, which is often complex due to the fragmentation of different specialised services.

The interviews clearly reflect a rigid recruitment system, both complex and centralised, the lack of professional careers and the lack of an appropriate development of incentives and support policies. The strong features are a highly skilled workforce and the level of qualification of the personnel.

Within the radiology services, new technologies being introduced in the past decade have made obsolescent some more traditional radiographies. New digital machines, scanners, magnetic resonance and CATs are taking more and more of the effort of the services.

All of these have had an effect on staff: because the entry procedures are by access through exams to the civil service, reconversion and retraining has happened within the service; the night shift has been introduced in radiology service (though not in all settings, only in those based in hospitals). Staff unable to adapt to the new demands have been moved to another section and new staff have entered though on temporary contracts and without being civil servants (bolsa de trabajo).

There are several levels within the service very clearly differentiated: doctors, nurses and technical staff. Among this last category, the one we are looking at, there are differences of status, not of performance obligations, which are the same within the radiology unit.

Because there is no specialisation in the education of nurses (university degree), for much of the technical work doctors cannot rely upon nurses and the nurses cannot pass responsibility over to technicians. There is a clear need for vocational training for nurses assistants, in order to facilitate their entry into the system, and in order to allow for nurses to pass over to them those tasks with minor responsibility.

Recruitment practices are based upon lists of applications (bolsa de trabajo). It is therefore useless to ask for a specialist in radiology, because it is seniority in the list that determines priority. Given that staff with fewer qualifications – technicians - are relatively new in hospitals, they get to work for periods of 3 to 6 months; once they have learned the job they must leave it because of circulation within the list, thus leaving the department having to train to the new technician. Experience shown in the CV does not count within the list, thus personal merits do not apply in recruitment policies.

A new law on quality applies for all of the European Union since December 1999, though its effects are not yet clear.

There are a great number of courses, conferences and seminars on radiology because it is one of the areas of medicine with the fastest growth in the past years. However, all the heads of service interviewed complained about the same issue: training is a problem mainly with nurses and technicians, and both are the groups to which most of that training offer is not addressed and thus are more reluctant to attend such training.

The interviewees said this is an ‘intrinsic feature’ to workers, who are not motivated either by their profession or by their particular job or workplace. This is partly due to the lifelong feature of civil servant work in the case of nurses; partly due to the insecurity of the lists in the case of technicias. The problems arising from this lack of training adds to the lack of budget in order to recruit new staff, because of the financial crisis of the state, and this turns into heading towards retraining practices with existing staff. But if staff do not attend the training offer, there is no updating. When interviewing staff, both nurses and technicians answer that doctors are paid registration fees and daily allowances by the hospital directorate, while nurses and technicians must pay all of these from their own personal budgets.

Regarding vocational education, there is overall agreement in the fact that the theoretical background of technicians is not enough and often mistaken. Some initiatives have been taken by some hospitals on these issues, like offering a course by radiologists to teachers in vocational schools. The course was planned for 100 hours, but because of lack of agreement between the educational administration and the health administration it had to be stopped.

However, once vocational education is finished and with the work experience placements, after completing a good technical education and through satisfactory relations with the staff, students are in the position to be appropriate workers for the unit. But because of competitiveness within the sector, this is often hard: students in their placements do often show good adaptation and learning abilities to the workplace, though this usually happens in a hostile environment.

Because of the particularities of the training system in the public health system, the fact that radiology as an area has grown so much in the recent past is not reflected in the vocational education curricula. Therefore, much of the technical work must be carried on by doctors rather than by technicians. The excess of responsibility on the side of doctors and the lack of responsibility on the side of technicians reflects the strong hierarchical system of work in the health system.

Business federations are calling vocational schools to guarantee the equilibrium between theory and practice, knowledge and skills. Nevertheless, the fact that the administration is not able to agree on the organisation of the health structure does not allow for important practical learning of students and curricula often reproduce archaic working schemes in radiology.

It is widely agreed that the public system should introduce part of the management mechanisms of the private system, above all respondents referred to incentives.

The strong differentiation between the doctors and the rest of the clinical and support staff is reflected in the strong specialisation among doctors which finds no parallel in all the other staff. The training process in relation to new technologies is as follows: the doctor learns and teaches the nurses, who for their part pass some of the responsibilities to the technicians. But technicians are very scarce in the system because of the recruiting practices described above (in relation to the new profiles, reutilization of existing staff and so on). All doctors interviewed agree that the lack of agreement between the administrations of education and health reinforces and perpetuates the current model.