The Sunday Times recently reported on the unemployment figures in the UK but with an interesting twist on the story. It’s certainly true that the numbers of adults not in work is very high – and unfortunately shows no real sign of dropping soon. Unemployment figures released in February showed that 8 million adults are economically inactive. However  compare this with other reports which show that firms are still hiring (20% of employers) – despite the recession and one which says “out of 1.7m new jobs created since 1997 81% have gone to foreign workers”.  Why is there such a  mismatch between the UK labour pool and the vacancies?

The biggest problem, and the saddest reflection on UK education seems to be the difficulty of finding UK graduates who are likely to be good employees. The Sunday Times reports on a director of a medium size company who interviewed 52 candidates all with fantastic qualifications. The director described the situation- “of the 52 applications, half arrived late and only 3 shook me by the hand and looked me in the eye”.  He hired these 3 but all had finished within a year because of their attitude – turning up late, not being able to spell and so on.

What’s this got to do with UIC? Well, one of the most interesting experiences we have had over the last couple of years has been developing and introducing a new course – Workskills. With changes to the visa regime in the UK it has only been possible for foreign students to take courses which include a work placement if that was part of a course which led to a qualification at NQF level 3 (roughly equivalent to A levels) We have been teaching this course successfully now for a year and have seen it benefit the applicants hugely. For the students, the opportunity to actually gain some work experience is invaluable – not as cynics might suggest because they want to take jobs away from British workers, but because it seems to be understood in every country in the world apart form the UK that being prepared for work is likely to make you more successful for work. So we find that students form all over the world – Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Russia and on and on want to add to their home studies – to their degrees, but learning a second language and gaining some useful structured work experience in a different country. Imagine how much better equipped this makes them than someone who has always got wonderful grades at school but no experience at all of working and no second language. That unfortunately is the situation most British graduates are in.

The UKBA and the British government view foreign students like this with huge suspicion instead of encouraging the experiences they can gain and the positive views they can get of being in the UK – something that can last them all their lives. Our feeling is that the Edexcel Workskills plus course is excellent, really useful and should be taught across the UK curriculum as a compulsory subject before anyone goes into university. perhaps along with useful IT skills like being able to touch type and run spell checkers!

CILT have recently reported that the most in-demand qualifications by employers are a competence in IT and then in a second language. If you ally this to understanding what might be expected of you at work then you’ve got a winner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Learning English, UIC London, work experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.