Aston University Green Paper

Aston University

A Green Paper on Employability and Higher Education, What Why and How? “New Economic Thinking Needs New Educational Thinking�

Produced for the British Council Global Education Dialogues Asian Series Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

9-10 August 2012.

Content Foreword Executive summary 1. Introduction 2. Why New Economic Thinking?

3. The Development of the Aston Model 4. What are Employability Skills?

5. How Can We Deliver Employability Skills?

6. Specific Proposals for the Vietnamese Higher Education System Bibliography

Foreword I am very grateful to the British Council in Vietnam for asking me to write this Green paper for their Policy Dialogue in Ho Chi Minh City. I believe it is a very valuable ambition that they have set themselves and I hope this Paper will them succeed. I am particularly pleased also because it gives me a good reason to reflect upon the last 5 years of development work during which I have been creating a new type of work based learning programme for engineers to integrate their engineering competences with their academic studies. The early vision and support f the UK’s Engineering Council has been invaluable. Most of the work has revolved around finding new ways to integrate more fully the ongoing development of employability skills as opposed to them just being a bolt-on addition to programmes. Where we are now 5 years after starting is a very different place to where we originally thought we would be going, and we have learnt many lessons on the way. The we I refer to is the hugely valuable team who has helped me in this development work and to whom I am most grateful. They have shaped the vision and the processes and been crucial in the creating the understanding we have gained.. The ideas put forward in this Paper are a combination of all their expertise and I have just been fortunate enough to be at the centre of all that activity. However the proposals in this paper do not necessarily reflect either their views or the corporate opinions of Aston University, and any mistakes or errors contained in this Paper are solely my responsibility.

Executive Summary The economic models of the past no longer work well in a global context of dramatic change.

Recognising that human capital will become the most important form of all capitals in the future, governments all over the world are attempting to modernise their educational systems. Not surprisingly the new economic thinking requires new educational thinking. The most important skills in the future will be employability ones such as communication, learning and thinking skills. Traditional educational systems were not designed with these in mind. They were designed to efficiently teach, or transmit, the accumulated knowledge base from the expert to the novice, and in doing so they evolved to separate theory from practice. We now have educational systems which are linear, in a world which is decidedly not linear and very much unknown. This “Green Paper” has been produced with the aim of stimulating discussion around how to change our educational systems so that they create the future generation of graduates to meet both the world’s and Southeast Asia’s needs; so that we move away from transmissional models of education to transformational models. Asking the questions about how we can combine flexibility, professionalism, breadth and depth, the Paper will review the current thinking about the nature of learning and employability in a global context. As a result it argues that simple incremental improvement of educational systems is no longer good enough and that only Governments who adopt approaches which incorporate significant elements of transformation will gain the educational advantages they need to benefit their economies. It outlines proposals for one such approach based on Aston University’s many years of experience of running high quality programmes that create highly skilled graduates with first rate employability skills and finally sets out a number of possibilities for future collaborative activities designed to support the British Council’s dialogue initiative.

Section1: Introduction “There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.” (John Kenneth Galbraith) John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the world’s leading thinkers of the 20th century and one of the few economists who warned against the risks to the economic system which ultimately led to the crash of 2008. His famous quote about forecasters is the reason why in this Green Paper I will be making very few forecasts.

A Green Paper is a very special type of document. They are produced to specifically stimulate discussion on given topics at an organizational or regulatory body level. They invite the relevant parties (bodies or individuals) to participate in a consultation process and debate on the basis of the proposals they put forward. Their objective is to generate proposals for action that are then outlined in White Papers. So although I will be making very few forecasts I will be making a number of challenging or maybe even contentious proposals with the purpose of starting a debate about the actions now needed to that is now needed around employability skills.

The Green Paper is subtitled “New Economic Thinking Needs New Educational Thinking” because that is the main theme of the ideas put forward, along with argument that such new educational thinking should incorporate both sides of the theoretical versus practical argument, embrace both vocational and academic abilities, accord equal status to employability skills and intellectual skills, and that such education should be demand led by the needs individuals, society and industry.

In his book “Start With Why”, Simon Sinek discusses what he calls the Golden Circle – an alternative perspective to existing assumptions about organisational success. This Golden Circle is actually a series of three concentric circles with “why” at the centre, “how” as the middle circle and then “what” as the outside circle. He suggests that change can be achieved through either manipulation, which is bad and short term, or by inspiration, which is good and long term. The best way to achieve change by inspiration is by fully understanding why the change is desired, rather than just focusing on what change is wanted. The How and the What will automatically follow from the Why. So we will follow this Introduction with Section 2 which asks the question “Why New Ecucational Thinking?”

In Section 3 the Paper reflects briefly on the evolution of Aston University’s approach to employer engagement and work place learning. In retrospect we can identify a clear pattern of progress to get to our present position as one of the universities in the UK with the strongest track record for graduate employment. This use of critical reflection is a very useful tool in generating new knowledge and insights into a subject.

Section 4 addresses the issues of the meaning of “employability skills” from a number of different perspectives.

Section 5 considers the question of how to implement a strategy for the development of employability skills in higher education.

Finally in Section 6, building on Section 5, the Paper makes a number of specific proposals for the development of a new approach to higher education which incorporates the development of employability skills.

All of this is written in the context of globalisation. We are on the way to a global era but we are not there yet. We are leaving the industrial era and we are now in a transition phase, called either post-industrial or pre-global – depending upon whether you consider a glass to be either half full or half empty. Some commentators suggest that the global era will be one in which the knowledge economy will be the dominant form of wealth creation. Others suggest that in fact this is a misrepresentation from the viewpoint of the developed economies. In fact what is actually happening is a rebalancing of the global economy such that the production economy, for so long the main engine of growth in the developed economies, will now have to be shared by them with the newly developing economies, particularly those of Southeast Asia. There will be a convergence of the developed and developing economies leading to a more equitable distribution of production and knowledge around the world. Achieving a working balance between these two will be what drives the competitive advantage of nations in the global era.

But whichever is the case we have conclusive from our present economic turmoil that traditional economic thinking no longer works well work for a society that is transforming itself into a global one. Traditional economic thinking evolved from the growth of the free market economies in the western world during the industrial era which started with the Industrial Revolution. The internationally recognised father of economics as a discipline was Scotsman Adam Smith, with his book The Wealth of Nations, a title which still has huge resonance today, but whose content has been overtaken by a world that Smith could not have foreseen.

But Smith’s theories are still the basis of so much of the free market paradigm that underpins much of the world’s economic activity as exemplified by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation whose General Agreement on Trade in Services includes within its scope the requirement for education to be a freely traded “commodity”.

And of course alongside, and in the shadow, of this free market paradigm grew the educational paradigm we now have. Marx wrote: “ … intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling classes.” (Marx; quoted in Galbraith) And so they still are.

For nearly two centuries the two paradigms have supported each other and the social hierarchies of nations, and in doing so they have played a substantial role in supporting the economic transformations we have and are still witnessing.

However although there is a clear correlation between them it is far too simplistic to say that educational thinking has been the sole driver for economic development and thinking. In fact for a number of reasons educational thinking has slipped dramatically behind the development of economic thinking.

Educational thinking developed along number of lines but the one that has been most pervasive is what Schon called the “technical-rational model. This model of educational thinking, which establishes a hierarchy of knowledge, is the underlying reason for the separation of knowledge creation and knowledge application which we see in our present day university structures and models of excellence. We have a situation where there are different values placed on research

and teaching. The current model of excellence in higher educational as evidenced by the various university ranking systems, both national and global, is one in which research, or the creation of knowledge is seen as much more valuable and worthy than the teaching of knowledge. We look to establish world class universities as research universities, or at the very least research led universities.

There is a strong argument to be made that in the early days of the industrial era when the rate of economic development was slow and there was limited capacity and capabilities for knowledge development this may have made sense. Products were simple and the physical world needed to be understood in order to overcome the obstacles. The diffusion time for new knowledge to be translated into first working products and then into widely adopted technological practice was not a particular issue. The technology itself was not exceptional challenging and the teaching and dissemination of that knowledge was straightforward. But times have changed. Knowledge creation is now happening so fast and in so many different places that it is no longer a problem that we don’t have enough of it. In fact the problem could be that we have too much of it being produced by “competing academics” all looking to establish an academic competitive advantage over each other. Knowledge creation is no longer a social good – it is a commodity. Perhaps it could be that the balance between quantity and quality has been lost. The statistics on the production of academic journal papers can be looked at as either encouraging or depressing.

There is no point producing knowledge which is either not usable or used. The drive to create new knowledge is vitally important but perhaps it is just as important to find better ways to make use of the knowledge we already have before we create more mountains of unusable knowledge.

The western economies, who established the educational models and paradigms that the world now uses, were very successful at acquiring, and then subsequently exploiting, the physical and human resources they needed to create wealth for themselves. During this era the human resources profile needed to do this was reflected by the educational thinking. There was a need for large numbers of workers educated to a basic level sufficient for them to be able to operate efficiently and effectively in the factory production systems. There was a small need for intellectual thinking to mange and control the industrial system. So we evolved an educational system which produced large number of “blue collar” workers, and a few “white collar” workers, i.e. university graduates.

However the western economies have not demonstrated the same ability to manage and exploit the human and financial resources that are currently driving the pre –global era, as evidenced by firstly by the dot.com bubble and more recently by the economic crisis. Our intellectual thinking was not up to the task. It had fallen behind and was still, and in many cases still is, trapped in the industrial era educational paradigm. The human resources profile need has changed but our educational system has not changed accordingly. We have attempted to increase the number of university graduates – targets of up to 40% tertiary education enrolments abound throughout the world – but we still have the same basic transmissional educational models and systems for producing them. And so of course it’s not working well.

Globalisation is causing so many changes to the way we live and work. The world we inhabit is now a far more complex world than it was only a century ago. The world is not homogenous and it never will be. Globalisation is not about imposing a single global way of doing things (including a single approach to education). Every nation and culture wants to, and should, maintain its own identify within the global environment. But we are now becoming so interdependent that we have to have the ability to cope with that additional variability and hence complexity. The ability to deal with complexity is at the forefront of the challenges we face. The

argument for this was clearly laid out by Senge over 20 years ago in his book the 5th Discipline, where he identified “systems thinking”, the ability to understand complexity, as the discipline that integrates the other four disciplines, (mental models, personal mastery, team learning and shared vision), into the coherent body of theory and practice which can support the learning organisation. Senge was greatly influenced by the works of W Edwards Deming, who was highly critical of what he called the prevailing “system of management” which governed Western institutions and required transformation into an optimised one which gained long term success through long term commitment to new learning. Deming clearly knew the link between education and economic management and in his many seminar sessions would regularly say “We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system.” or words to a similar effect.

Deming died in 1993, having had an enormous influence on industrial management theory, but even more so on industrial management practice across the world. But he was well aware of the impact that globalisation and the growth of knowledge workers would have and he developed his theory of “profound knowledge” which explains how knowledge can be created through the constant testing of new ideas, which evolved into the well known “plan-do-check-act” cycle.

Since then we have moved far more quickly to a world that is coming to be dominated by the knowledge economy. The emerging economic structure of globalisation is being built around the use of knowledge and skills to generate innovation and as a means to creating wealth. But, in a way which would not have surprised Deming in the least, we have not so far been very good at doing that, because we have, for the most part, refused to transform our Western ways of thinking.

The existing industrial/academic model is failing us as evidenced by both a steadily increasing skills gap and at the same time large numbers of unemployed or underemployed graduates. We are not producing the skills in our workforce that we need.

In 2011 an IBM study “Capitalising on Complexity” the major conclusions were: 1) The world’s private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue — indeed, to accelerate — in the coming years.

2) They are equally clear that their enterprises today are not equipped to cope effectively with this complexity in the global environment.

3) Finally, they identify “creativity” as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity.

Creativity has been identified over and over again by research study after research study, as the single most important skill we need in our workforce, to be able to cope with the changes coming about as the world proceeds toward the global era. The changes will be immense with one of the most notable being the rapidly shifting economic power structures. The changes were irreversibly underway prior to the 2008 economic crisis but that event has speeded up the rate of change significantly and changed the rules of the game. The developed westernised economies have stumbled as a result of inherent weaknesses in there educational system, and that is allowing the developing economies, most notably those of southeast Asia to catch up and re-balance the unequal global wealth distribution.

Perhaps then we should be asking ourselves why the developing economies are therefore so keen to adopt an the educational paradigm of excellence based on the old developed economies paradigm? Do they wish to repeat the same mistakes themselves?

In spite of this the western developed economies do have immense residual strength in depth, and it is possible that after a painful period of learning the lessons of their economic and educational mistakes they will pick themselves up and eventually follow Deming’s advice to transform themselves. But only if they address and resolve the fault lines in their systems. They are not hidden. They are well documented and known about by all. Deming and others have given them the solutions. Governments have been discussing their implementation for over two decades and indeed there are a number of pockets of excellence that are examples how it can be done. And I suggest that Aston University is one of those examples. There just wasn’t a serious enough reason for the majority to be doing anything until now. To follow the advice of Sinek, the management of change by manipulation didn’t work, so now is the time for the leadership of change by inspiration.

There is an expression that we learn more from our failures than we do from our mistakes, and as a corollary to that we might say it is easier to learn from our own mistakes than from other peoples. Of course because our own mistakes are more significant to us. But – and this is a big but – it is far more valuable if we can learn from other peoples mistakes. This Green paper is suggesting that as part of this British Council Asian Policy Dialogue the developing economies of southeast Asia should look at the mistakes of the existing educational paradigm and learn from them to adapt and develop a new educational model for the 21st global century, one grounded in a genuine critical reflection of the role of higher education in a global society. And on of the biggest advantages of that global society is that we are all in it together. We must use that asset for all its worth. Dialogue, including dialogue around the lessons to be learnt from mistakes as well as dialogue about our successes, is the way best forward.

Section 2: Why New Educational Thinking?

Existing educational models are falling far behind what is needed. The skills gap is a global phenomenon in spite of it having been talked about for over 20 years. Traditional educationalists have had their chance and they have not come up with the answers. The UK’s experience of growing higher education until it now stands at approximately 40% participation rates has not solved the UK skills gap problem – instead some might say it has just exacerbated the problem.

The funding models used to create the growth have proved to be unsustainable and so the higher education sector in the UK is now having to undergo radical changes to resolve that. And even if these changes succeed in providing a secure and reliable funding mechanism, which is in some doubt, there will probably be significant fallout from these changes which will interfere with universities strategic plans, and they will certainly in the least, prove to be a major distraction.

In the Foreword to 2006 the UK Government’s Leitch Report, Lord Leitch stated: “It is clear from my analysis that despite substantial investment and reform plans already in place, by 2020 we will have managed only to “run to stand still”. On our current trajectory, the UK’s comparative position will not have improved significantly.”

And many argue that since 2006 things have not got much better.

And if the higher education sector keeps on thinking about itself and its role in society the way it has done in the past, then things will not get better in the future either. The whole of the education and higher education in particular needs to start doing what higher education claims it can teach; it needs to start innovating. It is time to start thinking differently.

For a very crude analogy we can look at the different thinking that has taken place in manufacturing sector where over the last 30 years there has been a significant change in its operating paradigm. Inspired by the thinking of Edwards W Deming the Japanese manufacturing economy led the way. During most of the industrial era the production process was driven by the objective of improving efficiency in production and it was effectively a top down management “push” system. The manufacturing experts determined the most effective way of producing a product and then did so – on the assumption that their forecasts of what customers needed would be right. The desired output was forecast and on that basis the inputs organised so as to produce what the experts said would be needed. Everybody knew this did not work well, but in an era of limited supply where customers had little choice it did “work”. However as supply increased with growth in global manufacturing the emergence of the “pull” concept, most notably by Toyota, demonstrated the weaknesses of the push model. Push manufacturing might be efficient but it was not particularly effective in producing the product customers actually needed. Pull manufacturing on the other hand was very effective at producing what customers wanted, when they wanted it. The change to this demand led type of manufacturing, along with other changes to quality management methods enabled manufacturing to increase both quality and quantity of output at the same time.

Isn’t this what we now need in education – particularly higher education?

We have had a system for too long where the educational experts have determined the types of courses that should be delivered in universities. Other experts have determined what the content of curriculum should be and other experts have determined the entry requirements and assessment standards. Where has the voice of the customer been?

It hasn’t been heard, partly because it hasn’t been listened to but also because the customer has far too often not spoken. They have criticised and complained very often. And they still do. But rarely do they engage with the suppliers of their human resources in the way they would with the suppliers of their physical resources. In most other parts of business “demand-led” is the standard mode of operations – but not in the supply of graduates from universities.

Why is this?

Even the Leitch Report clearly identified as one of five principles for action the need for the educational system to become “demand- led” i.e. the equivalent of a pull manufacturing system.

The other principles being: shared responsibility between employers government and individuals, focusing on economically valuable skills, a flexible educational framework that could adapt and respond to changing conditions, (because forecasts are always wrong) and a framework built on the existing structure, through simplification and rationalisation.

The Government responded to the Leitch report with a specific approach for higher education as outlined in its White Paper “Higher Education at Work; High Skills – High Value”. This identified their belief in the twin aims of “more, and more, employable graduates” and “to raise the skills and capacity for innovation and enterprise of those already in work”. Put simply an increase in quantity and quality. The document reaffirmed the ambition to raise participation

rates to 40% or more in the belief that this would raise productivity, but it also identified the need and indeed the failings of the higher education system to meet the employability requirements of its graduates. “We want to see all universities treating student employability as a key part of their mission”. A range of initiatives where either announced or re-announced, including such things as Foundation Degrees, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, etc; a list of tools to support the employer engagement process, and it challenged the university sector to adopt them more widely in the process of becoming more demand led.

The UK Government then set up the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) to advise Government and to oversee the activities of the various Sector Skills Councils and the Train to Gain Programme. It was (and still is) a non-Governmental body which describes itself as a social partnership, led by Commissioners from both large and small employers, trade unions and the voluntary sector, with a mission to raise UK skills levels to help drive enterprise, create more and better jobs and economic growth. It would provide advice to Government and oversee the activities of the 25 various Sector Skills Councils.

In 2008 when as part of a subsequent Government review of the Letch Report when asked whether universities were being responsive enough to the skills agenda, Chris Humphries, Chief Executive of the UKCES, said: "No, I do not think they are. I think they have only just very reluctantly and very recently understood the need to sort of have a better focus on this". Clearly universities were not keen on becoming more demand led.

In spite of the difficulties the Higher Education Funding Council England, which distributes public money for higher education to universities and colleges in England, has continued to sponsor programmes to encourage and support universities in developing employability schemes and employer engagement activities including supporting a large number of graduate internships.

However overall the impact has been uninspiring. With a few notable pockets of excellence (which includes Aston University) the UK has still not substantially achieved the changes aimed for in the Leitch Report.

With hindsight it might be possible to determine why. But hindsight wasn’t actually necessary. In 2007 Alison Wolf Professor of Economics at King’s College London clearly articulated the main problem with the Leitch Report. “Again and again, the Leitch report argues for a demand-led system which could reflect and respond to what people in the workforce recognise as valuable.

But the mantra is just that; a repeated set of words which do not connect with reality. Because the actual recommendations are not for a demand-led system at all. They are for yet more central planning.”

The outcome of the Leitch report was a central government system which set about determining what it thought the priorities for employment related education and training should be, through a hierarchy of councils, who would determined which programmes got funded and which didn’t.

Leitch also recommended a major expansion of the Train to Gain programme, a government funded programme to pay for lifelong learning training for people already in employment to further develop their employability and other skills. This did not require any contribution to the cost of training by the employer. As Wolf says “The idea that government should fund employers training directly is, if you stop and think about it, very odd indeed.”

The subsequently expanded Train to Gain programme was, as Wolf suggested, not very effective and has recently been scrapped, and Professor Wolf has been asked by the present Government to

look again at the way Government supports the development of skills, but this time restricting the scope of her investigation to the clearly vocational, under 18, sector.

Professor Wolf’s 2007 criticisms focused on the fact that the framework put in place was not one which would be demand led. Another serious criticism is that the aspiration was insufficient.

Sir Ken Robinson, who was for 12 years professor of education at Warwick University has argued the case that the education system generally is no longer fit for purpose in educating young people.. In “Out of Our Minds; Learning to be Creative”, he makes a very compelling case that our present education system stifles creativity. He argues that people and organisations everywhere are dealing with problems that originate in schools and universities and that many people leave education with no idea at all of their real creative abilities. Consequently he calls for a radical transformation of the way we teach. One of his favourite expressions is “a 6 year old is not half a twelve year old”. In other words life is not linear.

No; life is not linear but we have developed an educational system which is. Schools and universities operate very much on division of labour principles and we now produce education in the same way that we produce products. In educational factories. They are focused on the operational efficiencies of the educational system, not the effectiveness.

The World Economic Forum has for a number of years been producing annual reports Global Competitive Reports, using a Global Competitive Index. This measures the many factors that work together to influence a nation’s productivity and competitiveness and groups them into what it calls “12 pillars of competitiveness”. Pillar number five is higher education and training, because “Quality higher education and training is crucial for economies that want to move up the value chain beyond simple production processes and products. In particular today’s globalizing economy requires countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers who are able to adapt rapidly to their changing environment and the evolving needs of the production system.”

In Chapter 1 of the 2011- 2012 Report, whilst discussing the impact of these 12 pillars to stages of economic development the report writes: “Whilst all the pillars […] will matter to all economies to a certain extent it is clear that they will affect them in different ways; the best way for Vietnam to improve its competitiveness is not the same way as for Canada to do so. This is because Vietnam and Canada are at different stages of development; as countries move along the development path wages tend to increase and in order to sustain this higher income, labor productivity must increase.”

Developed by and from around the work of Professor Michael Porter of Harvard University, the report identifies a 3 stage model of economic development, starting with a Factor Driven Economy, going through to a Efficiency Driven Economy and ultimately an Innovation Driven Economy.

In the first stage of a Factor Driven Economy the most important four pillars that influence competitiveness are the basic requirements ones of: Institutions; Infrastructure; Macroeconomic Environment; and Health and Primary Education. For economies moving into the Efficiency Driven stage, the six “efficiency enhancing” pillars become key, and the first of these is higher education and training.

The report classifies Vietnam, along with Cambodia, as still being at the Factor Driven Economy stage of development. Clearly as it progresses to the Efficiency Driven stage it will need to continue the ongoing improvements to it higher education and training system.

Philippines is classed as being in transition to the Efficiency Driven stage. China, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand are classed as being in the Efficiency stage and Singapore, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, are in the Innovation stage.

I see no reason to review the statistics which demonstrate the obvious issues being faced by employers across the region in sourcing the labour they require. There are plenty of reports which highlight the negative impact on growth and other aspects of social life of having an inadequately trained workforce. Each country has its own particular issues to face and the employers of each country know better than any author of a Green Paper the day to day problems they are facing in finding suitably skilled employees, in training them sufficiently to be productive and finally in retraining them. That fact alone should be sufficient justification for the statement that the present educational system is no longer fit for purpose.

So why do we need educational thinking? The short answer is because the old ways of thinking are no longer working well for us. They are not solving the problems we face as we transition from an industrial to a global society.

Section 3: The Development of Aston’s Employability Model There is a wide spread view that the world is now moving toward a post-industrial phase of development and historians and writers often refer to latter half of the 20th century as the Post Modern Period. The Early modern period from the mid-17th century was a period of the development of reason over superstition and knowledge over ignorance. This period led onto a very rapid period of technical innovation widely known as the Industrial Revolution. During this period the wealth of many western nations was created by a combination of technical innovation and the exploitation of much of the world’s human and physical resources.

The industrial revelation was built on the three pillar of textiles, steam power and iron and steel making, and the city of Birmingham, the home of Aston University, was at the heart of much of this work.. The West Midland region of the UK was arguably the birthplace of the industrial revolution.. Birmingham was the home of the Lunar Society and informal group of inventors and thinkers led by the flamboyant physician and intellectual Erasumus Darwin (the grandfather of Robert Darwin) they included amongst others the manufacturing entrepreneur Matthew Boulton, the brilliant engineer James Watt, the radical polymath Joseph Priestley and the radical Social reformer Josiah Wedgewood. The fertile combination of intellectual debate and engineering capacity was a catalyst for so much technical innovation and subsequent industrial growth that Birmingham, with Aston University in its very centre, can justifiably claim to be the world first industrial city. The Boulton and Watt factory for the production of the world first condensing steam engines for driving rotary motion was less than 3 miles from where Aston’s campus in the centre of Birmingham is. The world’s first iron bridge was constructed at Coalbrookdakle less than 30 miles from Aston.

The demands of this technical development stimulated the need for better education and the period gave rise to the creation of many of the principles and practices that underpin our present

day education system. Education evolved so as to produce two types of human resources, the large number people required by the process of industrialisation and a second group who would own, manage and create the new technologies. It was very much a class based system, and this was reflected in the steady evolution of what we know call the technical rational model of knowledge, which is still the main underpinning believe today. As a result our expectations of what makes a good university.

Having been at the heart of this process Aston University is well placed to have a distinctive understanding of what makes a good university and particularly one that can support technical innovation.

Aston University has a long history of producing graduates that have the necessary employability skills needed by UK employers. The University started life in 1875 when the Birmingham and Midland Institute started a School of Metallurgy, which in 1895 then became the Birmingham Municipal Technical School. After going through various changes it became a College of Advanced Technology in 1956, before finally becoming Aston University in 1966.

Aston is a research led university with a small number of world class research groups. In the School of Engineering and Applied Science these are in photonics, bio-energy nano-technology, and the non-linear complexity. But one of Aston’s greatest strengths is that it’s very close links with industry has enabled it to become one of the world’s leaders in “employability”. Our programmes are constructed around employment needs with a systematic use of industrial or “sandwich” placements. Aston University pioneered the use of industrial placement years over 50 years ago. Over the past 20 years this has been repeatable identified by various reports and research programmes as being a key element in developing students’ employability skills, and Aston’s lead has been followed by a small number of other UK universities. We now have a policy of encouraging and support all our undergraduates to take some form of placement activity, with over 70% of our graduates having a placement or internship as part of their programme. In 2007 Aston’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Julia King, chaired a working party from the Royal Academy of Engineering, to look into the issues of educating engineers for the 21st century. In the first paragraph of their subsequent report’s overview it states: “No Factor is more critical in underpinning the continues health and vitality of any national economy than a strong supply of graduate engineers equipped with the understanding, attitudes and abilities necessary to apply their skills in business and other environments.” In other words engineers with employability skills.

A further Royal Academy of Engineering report in 2010 was commissioned by the UK Government to identify how to increase the number of employable engineering industry with the skills industry needs. The report called “Engineering Graduates for Industry” contains case studies from the six leading UK universities included two from Aston. The first looked at our use of placement years for engineers in industry, and the second about our work in starting the UK’s first Foundation Degree for Power Engineers, developed in collaboration with three major UK energy companies. This is a blended learning programme mixing elements of taught teaching with distance learning and work based learning. It has been running very successfully and clearly is meeting it objectives of producing graduates with high employability skills when the chief executive of National Grid says in a public forum, “Foundation Degrees make a impact quicker on the business than conventional graduate entry”.

The School has also recently joined a major international CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate) Initiative, which is a philosophy being supported by around 50 of the word’s top

technical institutions. All of our undergraduate programmes that are run by the Mechanical Engineering and Design Subject Group now use CDIO which involves a much more practical, cross disciplinary, project based approach to teaching and learning, and fundamentally embeds the development of employability skills within the curriculum.

In 2007 the UK’s Engineering Council initiated a multi-stakeholder project to develop a new educational route for developing the professional competences of Incorporated and Chartered Engineers. A work based learning MSc Professional Engineering framework was produced which incorporates both the development of professional competences and academic abilities concurrently, by engineers who are in full-time employment. Aston started its version of the MSc Professional Engineering in 2010, and this version fully embeds the development of academic abilities within the work role. Aston is the only university who now operates an international version of this programme, and we are the only university who run a BEng Professional Engineering programme, using similar learning methodologies, as part of the Engineering Council project.

Aston remains as committed as it has ever been in developing innovative work class programmes aligned to the needs of business and industry. Our vision is that in 202 Aston will be a top research led international university renowned for developing future leaders of business and the professions. But in a global society we will not do this in isolation. To reach our vision we will develop and build on the many existing international partnerships we have with other universities increase our collaboration activities across all areas of research, teaching and community engagement. Key partnerships are being developed across Southeast Asia and more will follow.

Our involvement with the British Council in this series of Policy Dialogues is one more element in that strategy.

Section 4: What are Employability Skills?

In spite of the UK having over 20 years of experience of trying to deliver employability skills we have no clear and widespread acceptance definition of meaning or of what they are. However there are three generally accepted ways of interpreting what employments skills are about.

1. Graduate employability skills are those skills that enable graduates to get a job, preferably one that is appropriate to their education, after they leave university. The success of delivery is the determined by graduate employment statistics.

2. The second way is to consider that they are the skills that graduates need to be able to “hit the ground� running when they get there first employment role. The skills that will enable then to contribute to their employers added value activities without having to undergo further on the job training.

3. Finally the third way is to consider them the whole range of skills and abilities which graduates can take with them into the world of work and continue to use as they progress through their career and enable them to maximise their long term success.

Understandings 1 and 3 can thought of as short term and long term perspectives respectively.

These are either ends of a spectrum and of course in practice both of these overlap considerably with those of the mid spectrum position 2.

However the differences between the positions do become important when we start to consider how to develop employability skills competence in students.

A further complication is for what arena of employability are we developing graduates for. For most of the past 20 years in the UK we have been concerned with employability skills as needed

by UK employers from a solely national perspective. More recently of course we have been starting to adopt an approach which aims to produce global employability skills. Again there is an overlap – but there are also significant additional demands for global employability.

According to a recent employer sponsored research programme global businesses require “talent to compete in global marketplaces and have higher expectations of graduate recruits than ever before”. In turn these global graduates require “a blend of knowledge, competences and corresponding attributes spanning a global mindset, cultural agility and relationship management, and they much be able to apply then flexibly. Specifically they must have of communication skills; management of complex interpersonal relationships; team working and collaboration skills; adaptability, flexibility, resilience, personal drive; and learning agility.”

This last skill might be considered as the most important; the skills of learning how to learn.

An Aston led research programme during 2006 and 2007 looking at employability competencies for business and management graduates across 4 different European countries identified 8 key global employability competencies; communication skills; team working and relationship building abilities; self and time management; ability to see the bigger picture; influence and persuading abilities; problem solving abilities; leadership abilities; and presentation skills.

The majority of graduates and employers drew attention to the role played by work experience in equipping graduates with many of the necessary skills and competencies required in the workplace. Work-based learning in the form of formal work-placements and internships was noted as being particularly valuable. Those graduates whose undergraduate programme had incorporated a period of work based learning benefited greatly. Formal work-placements and internships enable students to put into practice discipline-focused knowledge and skills, whilst enhancing their employability skills.

In follow up paper Dr Andrews and Professor Higson explored the relationship between the “soft” employability skills and the hard business competencies required by employers. A clear conclusion was that across Europe there was a marked similarity in employer’s expectations of graduates to be employment ready, and this required a complementary mix of hard and soft skills, and notably a need for prior work experience, to have practiced those skills.

In the professional field there are very often sets of competences identified for professional practice. In the field of engineering there are many such set of competences produced by national regulatory bodies. However a major global discipline there has been much work done to come towards a common set of competences for global engineers. Although there is still much to be done bodies we are starting to see a convergence of ideas as to the characteristics of a professional engineers, and these always include competences which can be defined as employability skills. In the UK the competency standards are laid down by the UK’s Engineering Council, and they consist of five similar groups of competencies for all three categories of professional status. We can use these as the basis for considering employability skill groups.

•

Group 1. Engineers must be competent to use a level of knowledge and understanding appropriate to their level of practice.

•

Group 2. Engineers must be competent to solve problems again appropriate to their level of practice.

•

Group 3. Engineers must be capable of handling responsibility for their own actions, and where appropriate for the actions of others who they are managing.

•

Group 4. Engineers must be effective communicators and work with others in teams environments.

•

Group 5. Engineers must be committed to a professional code of ethics relating to their conduct.

Although these were written specifically for engineers it doesn’t take much to convert them to any discipline and we could then arrive at a set of employability skills which says: Employability is the competence to: a) do the job employed for effectively; b) to be able to cope with matters when the job does not go according to plan; c) to take responsibility for doing the job; d) to be able to communicate with others in order to ensure the responsibility is complied with and e) to do the job ethically. If an employer can trust an employee to do a job thus then that person is employable. If an employer cannot trust somebody to do a job thus then they either have to provide them with close supervision whilst they are doing it or they shouldn’t give them the job in the first place; i.e. they are not employable.

A further way of looking at employability skills is slightly more demanding. In the pre-global knowledge economy nations are looking to progress their development as quickly as possible. As was identified by the World Economic Forum however nations who are at different stages of that progression will need to adopt different strategies for gaining competitiveness. It follows therefore that perhaps different understandings of employability should apply. For nations at the Factor Driven stage the understanding of employability might well be those associated with national employability needs based on being able to get a job and hit the ground running. For economies in the Efficiency Driven phase maybe it should be more than this and associated with a view of global employability skills and based on the groups of skills discussed above, where a wider professional perspective is needed.

For Innovation Driven economies, perhaps by definition we need to think that we need something more though. These economies need high added value activities to be continually developed and innovated in order to grow productivity. Essentially this is the employment characteristic needed. A skill which enables innovation and growth in productivity is the most desired employability skills. As such creativity again becomes the most important employability skill and once again we are back to Ken Robinson’s call for a radical transformation of the education system to stop teaching conformity and start teaching creativity.

Section 6: How Can We Deliver Employability Skills?

First we have to understand (envision) our objectives:

This Is What We Want

The World of Education Universities

The World of Work

Employability Skills

Colleges

Multinationals Large

SMEs

Schools

Self Employed

This Is What We’ve Got

The World of Education

The World of Work

The Skills Gap Universities Colleges Schools

Multinationals SMEs

Large

Self Employed

The Skills Gap is what everybody is working to close. In order to do that we have to understand what has causes it in the first place. I suggest there are three reasons for this which are now acting together to create it: 1. The Technical-Rational model of knowledge that we have evolved during the Industrial Era has separated the world of education and the worlds of work.

2. The separation between work and education causes time lags in the ability of the world of education to respond to the needs of the world of work.

3. Given those time lags the rate of technological, industrial and social development now exceeds the rate at which the world of education can keep up with the changing requirements of the world of work.

The time lags can and do of course work both was. The rate of take up of new ideas created in the research part of the world of education by the world of work is often an important issue. But there is a commercial imperative from the world of work to be always trying to minimize this.

Industry and commerce can gain competitive advantage by doing so. And indeed there has been commercial benefits made available to the world of education by the funding of research which is targeted at national objectives. But so far there has been little organisational or commercial benefit for the world of education to minimize the time delay the other way.

The ambition of governments to reduce the skills gap is now being driven by an almost “taken for granted” understanding that national competiveness is related to the skill levels of its workforce. But the relationship is not such a simple one as is at first assumed. Employers complain that the educational system is not producing graduates who meet their needs, and much research shows that this is indeed the case. But the skills of graduates coming out of a university are only one of the inputs to the productivity process. The other major factor that is not so clear is the ability of the world of work to put those skills to effective use. Just turning out more graduates even with better “employability” skills will not be sufficient unless those employability skills are developed in an environment which also enhances the capability of industry to use them effectively. The workplace has to get better at it skills utilisation. Employability skills are the overlap between the world of education and the world of work but they are not just the responsibility of the world of education. The world of work has to learn how to use the workplace to create ongoing learning, both in the hard and soft skills, and in the ability how to us those skills. This combination of better skills utilisation and workplace organisation to enable businesses to move higher up the value chain is now often being called “High Performance Working”, defined by the UK Commission on Employment and Skills as: A general approach to managing organisations that aims to stimulate more effective employee involvement and commitment in order to achieve high levels of performance … designed to enhance the discretionary effort put into their work and to fully utilise the skills that they possess.

(Belt and Giles, 2009, p3) Without identifying a means to utilise better employability skills what is the point in putting time and effort into better employability skills? What is required is a new understanding of the partnership needs between the world of work and the world of education. For the higher education specifically we need a new way of thinking about how graduate employability skills are created and developed in universities and used and refined by industry. For the world of engineering we need a new approach to using the whole range of educational techniques for developing the full range of professional engineering competences needed by engineering needed by world class engineers.

There are two widely basics approaches used by universities to developing employability skills: firstly they are either embedded within the academic curriculum, or alternatively there is a cocurriculum produced which specifically develops the employability skills but alongside and in addition to the normal academic curriculum.

Both these ways have benefits and disadvantages.

The embedding of employability skills helps tremendously in enabling the development of these skills by firstly demonstrating their relevance to the subject of academic study and secondly by them being part of the assessed element of a programme it gives a greater incentive to students to do well in developing them. A disadvantage is that by diverting some curriculum time to elements of academic content has to be taken out of the curriculum.

The co-curriculum approach is beneficial in that it can be far more flexible to allow students to develop them and demonstrate them using a range of ways to suit their particular needs. Doing elective employability module, or work placements, or internships can all be used. And of course this does not distract from the academic content of the programme. However such co-curriculum activities suffer fro the fact that the very act of separating them out can tend to devalue them in the eyes of some students, and indeed academic staff. This just reinforces the concepts of separation of words of education and work.

In practice it is normal to use a combination of both co-curriculum and embedding.

On its traditional taught programmes Aston’s School of Engineering and Applied Science uses a range of techniques, as follows, to do both: •

Giving students direct experience of industry by using industrial placement years and short term placements and internships, and developing work based learning programmes.

•

Giving students indirect experience of industry by using simulations of industrial processes, both physical and computer based; site visits; group projects; industry based projects; membership of professional institutions; using CDIO based curriculum.

•

Building industry input into the curriculum by; using staff with industrial experience and professional registration; using industrial visiting professors and guest lectures from practicing engineers; using industry liaison boards and representatives from industry on programme committees; professional accreditation of programmes.

However there is third way, and that is to embed the academic learning within the world of work.

This is not a method that can be easily be employed for the whole of a undergraduate programme, but it certainly is possible for substantial amounts of a programme as part of a blended learning approach it has great value. This way of putting academic content into real work practice is commonly known as work based learning. These are employer led programmes where the students are employed by a company at the same time as they are studying. The learning programmes they do are built into their employment role. The employability skills are inseparable from their academic studying. These programmes are about capturing learning from both the knowledge artefacts employed by taught course, such as text books, assignment work, academic staff, but also generating learning from experience, work teams and managers and mentors.

Programmes can range from either blended distance learning programmes, where there is a combination of work based learning and taught frontal and internet delivery, to full work based learning programmes where the whole of the programme is by work base learning, with no classroom delivery at all.

The learning pedagogy of such programmes is radically different from traditional taught programmes, and requires significant organisational innovation from the university in order to

both to deliver and catalyse the student’s learning, and to manage such different styles of programmes. As a result these sorts of programmes bring additional challenges and risks to universities but when they are done well they provide the highest possible quality of learning experience. In addition they provide the foundations for bridging the gap between the world of education and the world of work. To do them well the world of education has to come out of its ivory towers, and get itself intimately involved with the employment activities of the students. It has to be able to talk the language of industry; it has to learn the social and technical perspectives of industry; it has to really understand the needs of industry; and it has to work to the timescales of industry. In short the university and the employer have to become equal partners in constructing and delivering the learning experience. So the employer then has to learn how to organise the workplace for effective skills learning, and in doing so will learn how to improve their skills utilisation. This partnership for the delivery of both of developing better skills and better skills utilisation can be the basis for bridging the skills gap.

The World of Education Universities Colleges Schools

Employability Skills

The World of Work Skills Utilisation

SMEs

Large

Self Employed

Another issue which we need to consider is the meaning of what it is to be “skilled”. There has been much attention paid recently to something being called the “10,000 hour rule”. The term was popularised by author Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book, “Outliers; The Story of Success”, in which he examines a number of case studies of very successful people. He argues that key to success is mostly about repeated practice and that 10,000 hours is what it takes to get to the top of any field. He bases this claim on the research work of Professor K. Anders Ericson from Florida State University into our concepts of expertise and how is it created, which in turn claims that “experts are always made, not born”. However Ericsson’s work made a distinction between ordinary practice and deliberate practice. Just doing something over and over again is not enough. “When most people practice they focus on the things they already know how to do.

Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well”. Having a coach, and/or a mentor, is therefore a major element of deliberate practice; somebody who is capable of giving constructive feedback, and identifying aspects of performance that need to be improved.

But is education for employability is not only about creating experts, often it is creating competence. However I suggest the analogy with other forms of technology such as cars; so much of our present day technology which is built into normal “competence “ cars, was originally developed in the creation of “expert” Formula One racing cars. Understanding how we can create experts will enable us to be better at creating competence.

So who are the experts? They are the people at the top of the ability profile. Our traditional educational paradigm models this as a triangular shaped profile, with a large base of relatively unskilled people and at the top a very small group of experts. This fitted well with the social and economic demands of the industrial society. However maybe it is not so appropriate for the global society based on a knowledge economy. Levy and Murname have proposed a model that divides human skills in to 5 levels: 1. Expert Thinking; solving problems for which rule based solutions do not work.

Computers cannot substitute but can assist.

2. Complex communication: interacting with others such as within an organisational management environment. Again commuters can assist but not replace.

3. Routine cognitive: routine mental tasks which can be mostly be done by computerisation.

4. Routine manual; rule based physical tasks which can be done by automated systems.

5. Non-routine manual; physical tasks which are hard to define by rules. Such jobs are not likely to be supplanted by automation in the near future.

Imagine this triangular shaped profile now being impacted by computerisation and automation and we then start to mover toward a centre squeezed triangle with a wider top; i.e. we are gradually moving towards an hour-glass shaped profile, with a relatively large workforce required for non-routine manual tasks, a large workforce for expert thinking task, and a small workforce for the tasks where commuters and automation can be used.

If this is going to be the case we better develop an educational system that delivers the human resources needed for this profile. We need a “venturi” model, where the educational system establishes the basic skills we need for the non-manual routine and discriminates clearly those that have the potential to be accelerated through the central narrow belt and onto the expert thinking skills level. And one which provides the necessary learning environment to make that happen. Not a model which just sets fences for people to jump over to get to the next higher level one step at a time, and whereby the challenges get harder at each fence and so we restrict the flow more and more at each fence.

Fortunately our understanding now of how the human cognition processes work make this a easier possibility which it wasn’t a generation ago. The search for developing artificial intelligence has failed in many ways but it has given us far greater insight into what we mean by intelligence and how the human brain works with memory, experience, knowledge and understanding. Although in his book “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” Andy Hunt is adamant that a brain is not like a computer he has proposed a metaphor of the human brain as working in a way similar to a dual-CPU computer. This metaphor is similar to the left brain/right brain theories, known as brain lateralization, but he calls them working in either L-mode, or linear mode or R-mode, or rich mode, not left and right. Human intelligence needs both. The R-mode is what we need for creativity and the L-mode for logical thinking and communicating. Our present educational system is creating for L-mode thinking, it is poor for R-mode thinking. But we can redesign our system if we want so that it will develop both ways of thinking. This is a combinational model. It requires simultaneous practice of linear and non-linear thinking; logical and creative thinking; theory and practice; academic and professional.

In short employability skills firstly to a level of competence but in a way that will fast track to excellence. For our purposes it doesn’t matter whether it is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice or 5,000hours that is the target. What matters is that deliberate practice is part of the learning process and must be incorporated into the development of employability skills.

So how should we deliver such employability skills?

Firstly we have to understand what particular skills are needed. This can only come about by a dialogue and partnership between industry and education. Industry has to stop expecting education and government to solve the problem for them. Industry, education and government are all part of the problem. Industry because it has not focused clearly enough on how it maximises the best use of its human resources. Industry makes very specific demands on inward product specification but it does not does so on human resources specification. Education has to start to understand its true position in society. The days of education being free to divorce itself from reality are over. In a global society education needs to be both a provider of inspiration, knowledge and professional values, but it also has to be a server of social needs; and that includes the needs of the global economy. Wealth creation is crucial to the future success of our global society. We have previously created wealth from our exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and man’s physical labours. In a world of greatly increased population, and limited natural resources we have to find renewable resources to maintain our quality of life style. In a global society the inequitable use of human labour is unsustainable. But fortunately humans don’t just have the resource of labour, they have the use of intellect. Human intellect is most than just a renewable resource. It is if we manage it well a growing resource. Once we have used knowledge we not only still have it but with have improved it if we learn from that experience of using it we have in fact enriched our knowledge.

Having established a dialogue, we can then put in place the infrastructure to support the partnership. This will include the educational framework that will allow industry to take part ownership of the employability skills delivery. The university sector must be freed from some of the restrains it has. It must be empowered to engage in innovation in delivery with industry partners.

There must be a mechanism put in place that will enable industry to contribute financially to development of graduates with the necessary employability skills that they require with a suitable assurance of them getting the payback on their investment. This will include such things as employer sponsored programmes, employer involvement in recruitment and assessment strategies, and employer involvement in curriculum management.

There must be a Government led initiative to develop frameworks of professional competence standards for disciplines which enable the various employer and industry sectors to benchmark their employability and technical requirements against. These need to reflect both national regional and global ambitions.

Finally universities need to start experimenting with the various employability skills tools and techniques already in use elsewhere in the world such as in the UK, to establish an experience base for them to be able to develop their own appropriate mix of tools and techniques for them to implement in partnership with employers.

These activities are not sequential; they can be undertaken concurrently and can feed off each other, both to inform the dialogue and to reinforce the momentum of progress. Like a group of runners together who give each other support when the going gets tough, government, industry and universities, with their international friends needs to work as a team for both the national benefit and for the needs of the family of global nations.

Section 6; Specific Proposals for the Vietnamese Higher Education System to Debate 1. Dialogue There needs to be a genuine and sustained effort to generate an ongoing debate amongst the various stakeholders as to the why, what, and how of incorporating the development of employability skills into the Vietnam higher education system. Dialogue is about listening as well as talking. It is not easy to find the time to devote to it but unless a dialogue happens which incorporates the views of all then there is no chance of a truly demand-led approach being achieved and if that doesn’t happen Vietnam will be condemned to repeating the mistakes of others.

Government needs to provide the necessary motivation for the dialogue to take place, but it then needs to allow the two sides of the industry university to work with each other directly to generate a greater understanding of the issues that will barriers to success.

Government can then set up the framework that success in the context of its other policy objectives, its responsibility as the representative of society, and its obligations to maintain a regulatory role for higher education.

2. Employer Engagement Vietnamese industry needs to get serious about it engagement with Vietnamese higher education.

At the recent Vietnam Business Forum on 29 May 2102, the Education and Training Working Group made a presentation focusing on issues of their concern. They made recommendations which have real insight and value. However the do not propose that the business community should do anything other than that they are ready to participate and support any ongoing dialogue with MOET. Does the business community consider that the responsibility for making significant improvements to education and training, such that graduates are better prepared for the world of work, solely the responsibility of MOET? Who will benefit from a better trained and more employable workforce? Of course the individual employees will, and Vietnam in general; but probably most of all the employers will benefit. Yes of course it is difficult to engage directly with the higher education sector given the existing higher education system and structure in Vietnam. But just waiting for somebody else to solve problems is never a very good tactic for success.

The Proposal is that the Vietnamese Business Forum Higher Education and Training Working Group be asked to make proposals for the appropriate model of employability skills needed by Vietnamese business and industry.

3. Funding Quality education and training is not achieved without investment. But just increasing expenditure on education, although it might give improvements in educational attainment, does not necessarily lead to improvements in Total Factor Productivity (the proportion of output that is not explained by the amount of inputs used in production and a measure of the successful application of knowledge to economic performance). A Work Bank report in 2007 which looked at impact of educational investment on economic performance in the Middle East and North

Africa since the 1960’s clearly identified that whilst “education is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic growth” and that “educational attainment has not significantly contributed to economic growth or productivity in the region”. In other words it not just a matter of improving education by spending money on it, it also matters how you spend that money.

The money invested in education (or human capital) has to be thought of as an investment in just a rigorous way as any other form of investment. How much is being invested compared to what is going to be gained? The return on investment calculation of various options must be considered and compared. And who pays the investment and who gets the return.

Everybody knows about the difficulties in establishing relative values of public and private return on investment in education. But everybody also has a good idea about the costs of not investing in education. Employers are facing them everyday. The growth of the economy is being held back by a lack of skills. Individuals cannot make the most of their capabilities if there are no educational opportunities available to them.

Across the whole world governments in every category of development are struggling with the investment costs of education. It quite a simple problem – it’s the solutions that are complicated.

Basically, (if we if ignore charitable donations from alumni and others) investment in education can only come from one of three sources; the individuals benefiting from the education, (or their families), from government, either local or national, or from industry and business. All three benefit from education, so all three should have an interest in contributing. All three would like the other two to fully fund education, but that is not going to be sustainable in a global environment where education is now becoming a traded commodity. The increased participation rates being aimed for invariably mean that with very few exceptions it is beyond the capabilities of governments to fully fund higher education rates. Government funding should more preferably be targeted at their primary and secondary education responsibilities. So the complication comes in finding ways to equitably share the investment costs for different categories of educational benefit recipients. We need funding mechanisms which reward investment; we need funding mechanisms which result in effective spending; we need funding mechanisms which are efficient and workable.

Looking at international trends there has been a general move towards cost sharing schemes which enable the student for deferring their element of funding either by a traditional loan, as is the case of students obtaining a loan to fund their studies at RMIT in Ho Chi Minh City, or by systems of graduate taxation or income contingent loans, as is being introduced in the UK from this year. The government contribution will be formula based.

A less common option are those systems where employers are required to contribute by means of payroll tax or training levy. Evidence is scarce about their performance but there is some where they have been in use for some time there is some research that shows they can contribute to improvements in training performance. Most notable are the Singapore Skills Development Levy and the Malaysian Human Resources Development Fund. In the UK there has been an industry specific training levy for the construction industry for 20 years which seems to work very effectively for that particular industry sector. There is a similar one operating in Australia.

The Proposal is that the MOET investigates the options for the introduction of a sector specific training levy system, based on the UK Engineering Construction Industry Training Board model to test out the ability of such a scheme to adequately and equitably contribute to the development

of better employability amongst graduates. This should be as part of a wider ranging analysis of future funding mechanism incorporating greater cost-sharing by students.

4. Educational Infrastructure Modifications There is already a wide recognition that the Vietnamese higher education system is in need of ongoing infrastructure modification, and many proposals are already being discussed. This Paper fully supports those proposals but in addition proposes that there is a need to provide a common strategy and approach to the development of employability skills within the infrastructure. Such a strategy should recognise the value of employability skills development being a demand-led service.

5. Pedagogy Innovation Vietnamese universities should be encouraged to develop further collaborations with other international universities in order to experience the operational effectiveness of a range of new learning and teaching techniques and technologies. These innovations should be co-ordinated, but not controlled by MOET, in accordance with the desire to strengthen university autonomy as part of the ongoing infrastructure modifications.

In particular a number universities should develop initiatives which build on employer engagement practices so as to explore the various different possible ways of working that can eventually lead to a demand led system of higher education.

They should also introduce specific approaches to developing employability skills.