TRAINING


interesting to note that employers are reporting challenges in filling vacancies due to skill shortages. According to the survey – which saw 87,430 employers from different sectors took part, at the time there were 1.267 million staff lacking full proficiency for their role. While the £44.2 bn spent on training that year may sound high, another report, From ‘inadequate’ to ‘outstanding’: making the UK’s skills system world class, published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and development,2


pointed out that UK


employers spend less on training than other major EU economies, and less than the EU average.


Due to the high profile and public safety focus of the UK healthcare system, one of the sector’s main focuses is the provision of education and training to its workforce. However, with the ongoing financial challenge of supporting a public service with an increasingly vulnerable population, have we become overly focused on simply ‘ticking the box’ of generic compliance training?


The move to ‘e-learning’


With the birth of computers, the Internet, and ever-developing mobile devices, the trend for training provision has shifted away from what was considered high price, and time- and resource-intensive face-to-face training days, towards digital e-learning. I challenge this current culture of generic compliance training, and invite leadership teams to consider meaningful learning interventions as an alternative – interventions that connect subject matter with skills development, creating quality improvements that align with organisation-specific goals. The secondary school curriculum has, of course, changed since 1989 – from ‘progressive’ education (emphasising the need to learn by doing), to ‘developing’ (a combination of continuous testing and teacher assessment). It’s thus, in my view, no surprise that some of the skills reported as now lacking include: n Complex analytical skills. n Creative problem-solving skills. n Self-management skills. n Leadership skills. n Communication skills. n Working collaboratively.


This is further supported globally in the The Bloomberg Job Skills Report 2016: What Recruiters Want,3


different industry sectors against what each considered their most important and hardest-to-find skills (see Table 1).


Structure and background Operations in any organisation are supported by a framework of systems and processes which become the structure and backbone of service provision. To be successful this needs to have the


66 Health Estate Journal October 2019


Table 1: Skills ratings considered for healthcare sector roles. Most Important


Communication skills Working collaboratively Analytical thinking Strategic thinking Leadership skills


Creative problem-solving Adaptability


Motivation/drive Decision-making Risk taking


Work experience Quantitative skills Global mindset Entrepreneurship


‘‘ which charts the


Rating in % Hardest to find 60.0 Work experience 60.0 Leadership


56.3 Creative problem-solving 55.0 Strategic thinking 51.3 Adaptability


41.3 Communication skills 41.3 Decision-making 32.5 Risk-taking


27.5 Entrepreneurship 21.3 Analytical thinking 20.0 Quantitative skills


11.3 Working collaboratively 10.0 Global mindset 7.5 Motivation/drive


Rating in % 51.3


45.0 42.5 42.5 42.5 33.8 31.3 28.8 23.8 17.5 16.3 16.3 15.0 15.0


Courtesy of The Bloomberg Job Skills Report 2016: What Recruiters Want, 20163


I challenge this current culture of generic compliance training, and invite leadership teams to consider meaningful learning interventions as an alternative


complete understanding of all staff. Training is often focused on a specific subject, and it is the leadership team which (generally) decides what is most important for the workforce to know. Much compliance training has been born out of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which states, under ‘general duties’ of employers to their employees: ‘the provision of such information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of his employees’.


The good intention of this legislation is to protect people in their workplace; however, with economic pressures has this inadvertently limited the development of training initiatives? Interventions that encourage a connected approach to practice and performance improvements, for both the organisation, and its’ human capital’, have, in my view, become viewed as too expensive and out of budgetary reach.


Nowhere is this more acutely seen and experienced than in the complex world of healthcare – where ‘Engineering’ meets ‘Clinical’; ‘Public meets Private’; ‘Acute care meets Community care’; ‘Central government meets Local government’; UK meets individual nations, and ‘Legislation’ meets ‘Regulation, Guidance and Policies’.


Simplicity out of complexity It is inherent in human nature to make things complex, and out of this complexity often comes a drive for simplicity. The manufacturing industry calls this ‘lean’ or ‘agile’ systems of working. Manufacturers are constantly looking for improvements in the performance and productivity of whatever it is they manufacture, knowing that it drives their economy, the nation they reside in, and the world they contribute to. McDonald’s is a prime example of a large organisation that has created an infrastructure of systems and processes for optimum operations, that can be consistently and repeatedly deployed and implemented worldwide. The fast food giant understands that a structure is required for consistent operations, and to make that structure as simple as possible. The employee knows exactly what is expected of he or she, and the customer knows exactly what to expect.


Steve Jobs of Apple said: “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” In training terms, however, where does ‘simple’ fall down


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