The Paula Principle

UKCES

Growth Through People: gender and the productivity puzzle

The UK Commission on Employment and Skills has just published an excellent report, Growth Through People.  It sketches out, in considerable detail but in clear language, the puzzle of how the UK has a high level of employment; relatively high levels of high level skills, measured by graduate level qualifications; but low productivity levels.  Productivity, as yesterday's budget yet again showed, is crucial to our general prosperity. The most important implication of the UKCES analysis is to shift the focus from simplistic assumptions that boosting the sheer numbers of highly qualified people is a solution to our economic problems, to a much more nuanced and complex consideration of how skills are…
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Valuing Talent

Here's an interesting initiative, Valuing Your Talent, launched by a consortium including the RSA, the UK Commission on Employment and Skills and several major personnel/management bodies such as the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development. It's interesting in part because of the crowdsourcing approach, aiming to amass a host of ideas and opinions but also offering something back in the way of a £10K prize to help develop the best idea.  An Insights phase has just started, to be followed by an Innovations phase which will explore how the ideas might be put into practice. Substantively it's a challenge to all those who say 'people are our biggest asset' to come forward…
Read More

Growth Through People: gender and the productivity puzzle

The UK Commission on Employment and Skills has just published an excellent report, Growth Through People.  It sketches out, in considerable detail but in clear language, the puzzle of how the UK has a high level of employment; relatively high levels of high level skills, measured by graduate level qualifications; but low productivity levels.  Productivity, as yesterday's budget yet again showed, is crucial to our general prosperity. The most important implication of the UKCES analysis is to shift the focus from simplistic assumptions that boosting the sheer numbers of highly qualified people is a solution to our economic problems, to a much more nuanced and complex consideration of how skills are…
Read More

Valuing Talent

Here's an interesting initiative, Valuing Your Talent, launched by a consortium including the RSA, the UK Commission on Employment and Skills and several major personnel/management bodies such as the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development. It's interesting in part because of the crowdsourcing approach, aiming to amass a host of ideas and opinions but also offering something back in the way of a £10K prize to help develop the best idea.  An Insights phase has just started, to be followed by an Innovations phase which will explore how the ideas might be put into practice. Substantively it's a challenge to all those who say 'people are our biggest asset' to come forward…
Read More