Richard Shaw: Need to value and prioritise skills

Richard Shaw

Industry Training Federation chief executive Josh Williams is right when he said in a newspaper last week that training organisations are critical to "delivering skills for industry".

He is not right at all when he infers that "delivering skills for industry" does not require funding for our universities' degrees.

The problem lies in the assumptions behind Mr Williams' use of the word "skill". It goes without saying - or should do - that ITOs (Industry Training Organisations), polytechnics and other providers who teach occupational skills are central to the supply of the sorts of labour many employers demand. It should also go without saying - but currently does not - that universities are equally central to providing graduates with the sorts of skills required in the present and future economy.

University of California economics professor Enrico Moretti's book The New Geography of Jobs graphically demonstrates the transition the American economy has made from one in which value stems from the production of physical goods to one in which value is a function of innovation - the application of human ingenuity and imagination.

To become that sort of economy in New Zealand we need to value and prioritise the sorts of the skills students learn when they undertake, say, a Bachelor of Arts (BA). It teaches how to think critically and analytically, how to work and communicate across cultures, how to bring different types of knowledge to bear on a gnarly problem, and so on. Call them attributes, traits, qualities or whatever you want, but these transferable skills are crucial because they apply across time (they're relevant to employment both now and in the future) and space (they're in demand from employers both here and over there).

Indeed, Massey University has recently undertaken research with employers, which demonstrates just how important these transferable skills are today. Employers we have spoken to tell us that they value the intellectual agility associated with the BA and other university degrees because they need more, and not fewer, people able to navigate their way around the complex, rapidly changing, international environments in which businesses operate and, hopefully, flourish. In short, the evidence both home and away is very clear - the world needs more, not fewer people with university degrees.

The evidence is equally clear that we need more people with the kinds of skills Mr Williams advocates. But it is unhelpful to set this up as either one or the other, and disrespectful to infer that while graduates from ITOs "pay tax", those from universities simply "draw down loans and allowances" (when of course they also pay tax - and more of it than they would have without a degree - and pay back their own loans).

In this respect Mr Williams' comments demonstrate the very thing that's needed, and which university degrees provide: open-mindedness, imagination and the capacity to walk around an issue and see it from different points of view. One final point in support of the case for a university education. We know that today's young people will not have a single career. Instead, they will have at least five or six different jobs, some of which do not yet even exist. It would be pointless - and shortsighted - to train everyone to do a trade that presently exists. Rather, we need a significant chunk of our working population to have the sorts of intellectual, process and social skills required to navigate their way through a labour market that changes rapidly and in unexpected directions. In this respect, degrees do everyone a favour.

-Associate Professor Richard Shaw is the head of the Politics programme at Massey University's College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

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