2 January 2008
CIPD Ireland Director Michael McDonnell was interviewed on RTE Radio 1's Morning Ireland programme on Wednesday 2 January 2008 about skills development.
Read the RTE News report
Click on the following link to read a report of the interview as part of RTE Business' Morning business news round-up.
Listen to the interview
You can listen to the interview via the RTE News website. (Click on the link below and scroll down to The 7.50 business bulletin with John Murray)
Read the transcript
The transcript of the interview is below.
Presenter - John Murray
Unemployment during 2008 will go over five percent and put a greater emphasis on people acquiring new skills for work, that’s according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development whose Director Michael McDonnell joins us now. And Michael, the Institute represents people who you could, I suppose, describe broadly as those in the human resource and personnel divisions of companies. What New Year’s resolutions do they think workers should be adopting?
Michael McDonnell, Director, CIPD Ireland
Good morning, John. Well I think the... the key issue for the year ahead really is to concentrate on skill development. If you look at Ireland today, we’re... we’re moving from a low wage economy, and that’s very clear, so we’ve got to move into an area where we are far more competitive, in terms of the quality of the work that we... that we do, so you can see complex jobs are replacing repetitive jobs, thinking skills are going to replace manual skills. So therefore there’s a great danger, if we don’t address this issue, that we could almost end up with a two-tier workforce.
Young people going into the workforce today fully recognise the concept of life-long learning, very few people expect a company to give them a job for life and they recognise that they’ve got to take personal ownership and personal responsibility for their skill development. The difficulty is that people... particularly say over the age of forty, who’ve grown up in a more compartmentalised world, where you... you did your chunk of learning then you went into the workforce and you probably never had to open a book or do any learning again because the organisation looked after you. Those people are particularly vulnerable in the year ahead and over the next five years, because those kind of skills that they have will go out of existence and so they are more vulnerable to unemployment. Where the unemployment figures are relative... in relative terms is not bad, what you could end up with are pockets of almost permanently unemployable people.
John Murray
So what should the over forties be doing?
Michael McDonnell
I think... I think there’s a few things they could be doing. First of all... and I think its important to say, many employers do recognise this and so there is quite a lot of work done, where opportunities for on-job for on-going learning is important. There are probably other areas where organisations themselves are not providing the opportunities for the individual to acquire the skills for the future, so those individuals should begin to think of themselves almost as a product and they should look at themselves not being employed but being employable. And the question of employability means that if my job goes out of existence in the morning how quickly can I get a comparable job.
John Murray
So where do they go then to acquire these new skills?
Michael McDonnell
I think there’s a few things they could do. There’s a very good programme... adopted by FAS called One Step Up and I think... individuals, particularly in organisations that are not assisting as much, could contact FAS and look at that kind of area, because sometimes the... the task can be very daunting, you know, you think you can’t go from being an operative to a PhD, it’s not that kind of issue. What you’re really talking about is a marginal step incremental increase in your skill-base, so it’s not that difficult to do. The biggest problem that you put your finger on is where do people go for assistance? I think the One Step Up programme is a very good one.
There’s a.... there’s a second and... and very briefly, point I think as well for... for organisations, there’s Excellence Through People, which is a... a business improvement tool that FAS have as well, that’s a kind of a national tool, that helps organisations link their learning to business objectives and one of the difficulties with learning is that it’s not often... the link between it and businesses are not clear, I think Excellence Through People is a very good way of addressing that issue.
John Murray
So broadly the message is new skills for the New Year. Michael McDonnell Director of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, thank you for joining us.
Morning Ireland Business News, 2 January 2008, 7.50am, RTE Radio 1, 5 minutes duration