Lifelong learning on individual accounts: The impact of individual learning accounts on workers of low educational levels

Abstract

The image of the employee who stays with the same company during his or her entire occupational career appears to be becoming outdated. Individual workers no longer have a career for life that develops vertically in one organisation. Employees are supposed to be willing and able to take a more flexible stance towards their career in order to remain attractive in the labour market. The paradigm of lifetime employment seems to be making way for the principle of lifetime employability. As a consequence, educational policy makers and human resource professionals in labour organisations are becoming increasingly interested in the employability of individual workers. In order to meet the objectives of the Lisbon strategy to maintain the position of the European Union as a competitive knowledge economy, governments of the member states are becoming more aware of the necessity of creating appropriate conditions to facilitate the individual worker’s endeavour to stay employable (European Commission 2000). The European Commission has repeatedly called attention to the need to stimulate participation in training and educational activities of adults. Since the end of the 1990s, the Dutch government has attempted to encourage lifelong learning by introducing regulative policy measures aimed at strengthening the position of individual learners and, accordingly, stimulating the articulation of educational demand. Mechanisms for co-financing lifelong learning are measures which focus explicitly on the individual citizen or worker (OECD 2003, 2004). Following experiences with Individual Learning Accounts (ILAs) in the United Kingdom, at the beginning of this century, the Dutch government supported a number of (labour) organisations in society to explore modalities for implementing an instrument to provide individual workers with an amount of money for training activities, to which employee, employer and third parties could contribute in either time or money. These modalities are known as experiments with Individual Learning Accounts.