The Australian Skills Agenda: Productivity versus Credentialism?

Abstract

This article outlines the rise of the ‘skills recognition agenda’ in Australia in the past several years, the problems it is now encountering, and its likely prospects. The agenda will be familiar to UK readers since much of its inspiration has been gained from recent British innovation focusing on the NCVQ. The agenda's core ideas include: (a) more learning effort should focus on the workplace; (b) we should be open to different ways, times and places of learning; (c) we should be much more systematic about assessing and recognizing what has been learned. More concretely, the skills (or ‘competencies') required in workplaces and working lives should be carefully defined to provide benchmarks against which individuals can be formally assessed and recorded as holding skills, these to count for admission and/or credit toward a qualification, and for improved pay, status or opportunities in the workplace and the labour market. The larger origins of the skills agenda will also be familiar to UK readers (and to US readers, too). Putative skills shortages and low skills standards, especially in high transformation and export sectors of the economy, have been blamed for low productivity, low economic growth rates, and a poor export performance. The skills agenda is claimed to tackle economic and cultural problems at the root. The most distinctive Australian element in this transnational prescription is a uniquely strong relationship between the skills agenda on the one hand, and the union movement and the industrial relations system on the other. Indeed, much of the agenda has been shaped and driven by the unions and particularly the metals unions (a loose grouping of engineering and other manufacturing occupations). ‘Metals’ has used both its immense power within the ACTU (the Australian Council of Trade Unions ‐the peak organization of Australian unionism) and the ACTU's privileged relationship with the national Labor government to set a very influential economic agenda. The metals doctrine had its origins in the tariff cuts of the 1970s and 1980s which pushed the metals industry to the point of collapse. The unions responded with a radical re‐think of their century‐old strategies, and the upshot was published as Australia Reconstructed (1987), a seminal blueprint for industrial collaboration in the interests of national economic recovery. Needless to say, the unions’ plans reflected their own interests as well as those of the economy. In exchange for industrial peace and workplace transformation they sought extension of the comforts and securities of white‐collar life to the whole workforce. This they propose to do by using the skills agenda to double the present reach of the careers and qualifications system. The resulting tension between sectional and wider interests is at the heart of the skills agenda, and is the main theme of this article.