Jason Corsello picked up on the announcement this week of Salary.com’s acquisition of InfoBasis on his Human Capitalist blog.

I keep my eye on the HCM/Talent Management place, but I have never totalled up the number of ‘financial events’. Jason has, and he made this week’s acquisition the 51st since 2005.

What does it mean? The comments on Jason’s entry focus on how many of these purchases were genuinely to build capacity (as opposed to fire sales), and on the number of recruitment companies involved.

Whatever the detail, though, one thing is clear. As Bersin’s Leighanne Levensaler predicted earlier in the year 2008 is the year of TM consolidation. A few deals will involve the marriage of market leaders, as with May’s $129m Taleo / Vurv acquisition. Some will be technology purchases, as with Salary.com / InfoBasis, which provides Salary.com with a competency platform complementing its existing range of products.

And anyone who’s ever been in software will know that a good few of the deals will be ill-advised purchases of non-complementary technologies. These will fit a short-term goal (usually taking a competitor out of the market or buying revenue). The hoopla dies down, the new purchase fails to add value, but the buyer’s M&A activity continues unabated (that is, until the cash runs out).

Over the coming months it’s going to be interesting seeing who’s making the right calls.

Apprenticeships are the quiet success story of UK skills.

Numbers have doubled over the past decade, according to ministers, with 184,000 starts last year, and a 63% completion rate (which is apparently good).

And they are popular for the right reason. They give a combination of learning and workplace experience lacking from most vocational training. In other words they provide what both employees and employers want: skills and not qualifications. (For an excellent critical view, though, see Mick Fealty’s piece in the Daily Telegraph.)

There’s just one problem. Success has lead to every chance of apprenticeships becoming a political football, oh, and a rather sick piece of branding.

It all kicked off on Wednesday, with Labour announcing “a ‘universal offer’ of Government support for continued education or training”.

According to the DUIS press release:

Those young people who are interested in beginning an apprenticeship, will be eligible for an ‘Apprenticeship Credit’. This is a voucher to pay for the training that can be used to approach an employer to encourage them to offer an apprenticeship.

A good initiative, but Wednesday’s press puff coincided with VQ Day, “a celebration of vocational achievements around the UK”.

Ghastly.

Don’t get me wrong. We should celebrate success, especially of vocational qualifications, which this country badly needs. But VQ Day? That’s just sick. The deliberate attempt to put this in the same category as VE Day and VJ Day is a sick miscalculation. And no, it’s not a clumsy mistake; the site refers to ‘VQ Heroes’ and - particularly unpleasantly - has a ‘Roll of Honour’.

Conservative leader David Cameron, of course, is a PR professional, so had his ammunition ready and counter attacked on Wednesday morning with the message that apprenticeships had failed (which doesn’t really stand up) and that the Conservatives would create 100,000 apprenticeships. According to reporting in the BBC:

the initiative would help to build family and social stability…. Tory leader David Cameron says his party would offer small and medium businesses in England £2,000 for every person who completed an apprenticeship.

Compared with the VQ Day initiatives and John Denham’s pledge of an ‘Apprenticeship Credit’, these few words are a PR coup: no fluffy branding, a solid number (two grand vs. a voucher of some sort), plus a clear connection between apprenticeships and social order.

It looks like there is every chance that apprenticeships’ success will mean they suffer the same initiative overload that has been forced on education, but in the run-up to the next election, the score in this particular skirmish is definitely:

Labour 0 - Conservatives 1

When I find writing about competencies is getting too exciting, I like to write about the various bodies in the UK responsible for national skills development. A bit like an accountant kicking back by doing the filing.

No chance of getting too excited there, you might think… but you’d be wrong.

I was recently pointed to an article in the FT about Chris Humphries, Chief Executive of the UKCES (the UK Commission for Employment and Skills) getting hot under the collar about the Byzantine labyrinth of bodies responsible for skills in the UK. Apparently he said:

“I don’t think there’s an employer in the land who understands what the new systems are.”

The FT adds: 

The maze of government skills bodies has changed with alarming frequency, but Labour has pushed, pulled, squeezed, stretched and turned the public sector skills industry upside down at a faster rate than predecessors. Critics say this has not given each organisation enough time to establish credibility and competence.

One huge revamp of the system involves scrapping the over-arching Learning and Skills Council (the LSC, responsible for all vocational learning in England) and replacing it with local authority powers and three new national groups.

It’s not a pretty prospect.

Ironically the LSC began work in 2001 to make life easier:

to modernise and simplify the planning, funding and delivery of education and training for people over the age of 16 in England, other than those in universities

but as Humphries points out, this remit is huge, and in this case having a single body does not simplify, but adds complexity.

So how many bodies does the UK need and are any of them doing a good job of building the UK’s skills? Yes, down at the level of detail, I believe that some are. Last Friday I hosted a webinar. Speaking was Genny Dixon of e-skills UK, the Sector Skills Council (SSC) for IT. Listening were members of the Learning and Skills Group. I was able to put the two parties together.

SSCs are supposed to engage with employers, and the end-user IT qualification ITQ is undergoing an update at present. Genny was interested to quiz the employers attending the webinar about their views on end-users skills and how the new ITQ could function better.

In other words, not the sort of conversation that has the cocktail party jumping.

But it is, absolutely, the sort of detailed work that needs to take place for SSCs to engage with employers, do their jobs well, and build the skills of the sector they are responsible for. It is the sort of conversation that is only possible because e-skills UK has been in existence for 5 years, and has a good track record. In other words, someone has let get on with the job.

Interestingly, the SSCs were also set up as over-arching bodies. E-skills UK replaced some 38 different IT skills bodies, I believe. In this case the simplification has worked.

Chris Humphries is right that there are too many bodies for, and too much meddling in, skills. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Some of the bodies, and some of the people in them, are doing good work. We should remember that, too.

Last week I keynoted at a conference arranged by Stephen Citron of Informatology. The audience was largely workplace learning and development professionals, and the chair was Andrew Mayo, recently voted one of the top 10 HR thinkers on Human Resources’ Magazine’s annual poll.

I was there to talk about the intersection of two worlds: Talent Management and Learning and Development, and I thought it was about time for another airing of my definition of how Talent Management is all about ensuring organisations deliver on their strategies. Talent Management is about:

making capability match commitments.

Okay, that should be Making (human) capability match commitments, but as around 80% of organisational value is now intangible and that value is almost all driven by its human capital component, I feel justified in dropping the ‘human’. And it reads better, too.

How far do Learning and Development (L&D) and Talent Mangement (TM) intersect?

Where you come from alters your perception of what TM is. Recruiters (and those selling recruitment software) see talent acquisition and remuneration as key. HR specialists (and those selling HR software) tend to focus on workforce planning and assessment.

And the trainers, well of course for them TM is all about development.

In truth everyone’s right - Talent Management involves all these aspects. It also involves some strategic planning and interaction with the rest of the business which nobody ever talks about, and this is where I believe that the Learning and Development function can take a lead.

Here’s what I mean.

Just focusing on the L&D parts of TM, I believe there are three parts to it:

1. Understand what your workforce can and should do
2. Deploy it better today
3. Develop it to do more tomorrow

At present, L&D is - of course - focused on the third of these steps (although as Jay Cross and Charles Jennings have shown, L&D is by no means responsible for all organisational development). L&D is only involved in the second step when deployment is part of a development plan, which is how it should be, and yet in my experience (2) is where operations get involved in driving TM.

If you can help get the right people to the right job faster, you begin projects sooner, and finish them with fewer mistakes - in short, you deliver on your organisational goals. You ‘make capability match commitments’.

But you can only fulfil (2) if you’ve done (1). And this is the whole point. Who is doing (1) at the moment? Who is best placed to do it? Not the line managers. Operational line managers understand the benefit of stage (2) but have a job to do. Who is best placed to do (1)?

Well, who best understands the language of skills, and how capability matches to job roles? Who spans the organisation in a way that individual operational managers don’t? It ought to be L&D, and if it isn’t, then maybe L&D is in the wrong job.

The good part of this is that (1) is also essential to all the other parts of TM - recruitment, workforce planning etc.

The bad part of it is that it’s a challenge. A big challenge. I hope that L&D is up to it, because if they don’t do it, I can see a lot of re-inventing of the wheel happening as a whole bunch of people new to the game start to work out just what a a competency framework is, and how a job role works.

Oh dear.

Has it really come to this?

After bold claims that employers would be forced to provide training to raise the UK’s skills base, after the Accounting for People Task Force (2003), the Leitch Review (2006), after the effort put into the ‘Train to Gain’ scheme (2007 onwards), and this April’s setting up of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, what do we have?

The ‘Right to Train’.

A right that is no right at all, and use to neither employer nor employee.

As a hodge podge of compromise it couldn’t have been calculated to introduce any more confusion while doing less to address the UK’s skills needs.

‘Right to Train’ is the name the media has attached to proposals outlined in the Queen’s speech in May and last week by Skills Secretary John Denham. These are - more modestly and more realistically - entitled ‘Time to Train’.

This confusion over the naming of the proposals exemplifies what is wrong with them: poorly thought through, poorly presented and poorly received.

The idea is that just as employees have a right to request flexible working which can only be refused on valid business grounds, the same right should be extended to time for training.

This approach is simply inadequate.

Inadequate for meeting the skills needs of the individual, the employer or the country. Yet still enough to induce fear in employers that this is a budget-breaker’s charter: a deadly cocktail of bureaucracy and open-ended commitment to spending. So, one week after the launch we have skills minister David Lammy engaged in damage limitation with Personnel Today:

Employers would not be obliged to pay an employees’ salary while they were undertaking training, or to organise or pay for the training, but we would expect many to choose to do so.

Expect many to choose to do so?

Is this how the National Health Service was set up by Labour? ‘We don’t expect doctors not to charge patients, but we expect many to choose to do so’ ? Is this how the Conservatives took us into Europe? ‘We don’t know if all countries will drop trade barriers, but we expect many to choose to do so’ ?

You don’t bring about major change by expecting that others will choose to help you. You go out and make it happen. Asking employees to decide which training might be good for the business (the only sort that business will back) is inadequate. Asking employees to pay for it themselves or to find the government funding is absurd.

This is a weak initiative that has been poorly presented, leaving ministers like Lammy desperately back-pedalling and trying to appease both those rightly wanting more training for the under-skilled and those employers rightly concerned that meeting obligations will be a time-consuming cost they can do without.

Employees won’t know what training to go for. Those employers not already commited to training (and many are - they spend £38bn on it annually) won’t be persuaded to choose to change their ways.

The effort that has gone into preparing this consultation and then reparing the damage it has created should have gone into improving the Train to Gain initiative. Initally sceptical about this, I changed my views after writing an article on it for IT Training Magazine and interviewing the LSC’s Jaine Clarke. The scheme is imperfect, but is heading in the right direction, and has shown that it is capable of positive change in response to criticism. Nonetheless, it has a way to go: about £115m set aside for Train to Gain was unclaimed last year. My advice to the government: get this one right first.

My advice to anyone else interested in the UK’s skills base would be: get involved in the Time to Train consultation and make your voice heard.

I don’t normally deal with politics on this blog. I stick to competencies and software. This morning, though, I read news which will affect the UK and EU skills base, and I can’t avoid it just because it is political.

A Turkish publisher, Ragip Zarakolu, was sentenced to five months in prison after a judge ruled that The Truth Will Set Us Free, written by George Jerjian, “insulted the Turkish republic”. The sentence was under Article 301, revised in April.

As the Guardian puts it:

The altered law banished the crime of insulting “Turkishness” and reduced the maximum sentence from three to two years. It also lay down that all prosecutions need prior approval from the justice minister.

What does all this have to do with UK and EU skills?

As it happens, quite a lot.

Most people put the time-scale for the accession of Turkey to the EU at about 20 years. Personally, I think it will happen sooner.

Here’s why.

Turkey has a population of 70 million, half of whom are under 30. As the population of the EU ages, the prospect of tapping into this increasingly well-educated work force is going to seem increasingly appealing.

Put simply - sooner than most people think, the EU is going to need Turkey to join.

But there is no way that a country that bans free speech will - or should - be allowed to enter the EU. The April downgrading of the penalties under article 301 was a sop, a typical Turkish compromise designed not to anger anyone.

And there’s another very good reason why Turkey should drop Article 301. It doesn’t need it.

Right now Euro 2008 is proving a great success. Turkey have played some brilliant soccer, coming back in dramatic fashion to win their last two matches of the group stage.

Because none of the home nations managed to qualify, everyone in the UK seems to have picked a team to support. I have chosen Turkey, because I have spent some time there and also because (when their players remember to avoid gamesmanship) they play some attractive football.

Tonight they play Croatia in the quarter-finals, thanks to a goal scored a minute or so from full time by Nihat. Here it is:

For me, this is the goal of the tournament so far - Nihat showed brilliant skill to turn his man and then place the ball - from outside the box - in the top corner, beating the world’s best keeper, Peter Czech.

But even more than the goal itself, listen to the crowd as they chant “Tür - ki - ye! Tür - ki - ye!” If this country ever felt unsure of its place in the world, or in a European context, that time has gone.

Article 301 need never have been enacted in the first place. It certainly isn’t needed now.

I have recently been listening to HR systems commentator and conference chair Bill Kutik on his podcast: The Bill Kutik Radio Show. This co-production with Knowledge Infusion has an interview with a leading light of the HR technology community every 2 weeks.

My favorite episode to date is probably the interview with Kent Plunkett of Salary.com, because Bill raised my favorite topic of competencies ….

Kent Plunkett, talking about the recent acquisition of ITG Competency Group, says, about 14-and-a-half minutes in:

I think that competencies are going to be the next big strategic move for HR. I think that if you deploy competencies properly it will power your Talent Management and it will allow you to measure … the growth in the talent capabilities of your workforce.

Okay, you might say, Kent has to say this after buying ITG Competency Group in July of last year, but he’s not alone in this opinion, apparently.

Here’s Bill Kutik’s reply:

… every expert says that Talent Management has to be based on competencies or it just doesn’t work…. It is the integrative fibre among the 6 or 7 applications generally considered part of the Talent Management suite.

I’ve never heard it called integrative fibre before, but it’s not a bad term, and the idea is exactly right: pass the data on competencies between applications and you have a coherent talent management overview. Ignore it, and all you have are a bunch of siloed applications with mis-matching data and duplicated effort of data entry, control and interptretation.

This is my hobby horse, of course. For more, just click on the competencies category.

One month on, the comment continues. This one has certainly - rightly - attracted plenty of comment. Almost all of it is positive (excluding my mildly sceptical stance). Here’s some comment worth reading:

• Bill Kutik is on the money with his column This One Really Matters.
• Jason Corsello comment of 12 May remains valid.
• Gartner’s Jim Holincheck and Thomas Otter did a short paper on the deal.
• Bersin’s Leighanne Levensaler has a paper, too.

Kutik raises the point, rightly, that Taleo has long stuck to “one standard and configurable application”, which has always seemed to me the right approach. If they are doing more than just buying Vurv’s customers, the key question has to be whether they can integrate what they want from Vurv’s less integrated platform. (And which pieces they will integrate still seems unclear.)

Leighanne Levensaler spotted at the beginning of this year that 2008 would be the year of TM consolidation, and asked the question every customer wants answered when their supplier merges with another: will it last? She produced a hand check list to help you tell.

Her take on the acquisition sums up a general positive view from the analysts and commentators:

With more than 3,400 customers, the combined Taleo / Vurv company is clearly the number one leader in recruitment management and the largest non-ERP solution provider offering support for multiple talent functions. This acquisition will create very little interruption for customers and prospects in the near term, and has the potential to create one of the most sophisticated talent management solution providers in the market. Ultimately, this is a very positive announcement for the talent management systems market.

In the face of such an overwhelmingly positive reception, it seems that in time I will have to revise my initial scepticism. I’m prepared to be shown to be wrong. But I’m also prepared to wait and see.

Ruth Spellman started on Monday as the new CEO at the CMI (Chartered Management Institute).

Spellman is most famous for her 8-year tenure at the top of Investors in People(IIP). Although some saw its standard for investment in people as a pointless box-ticking exercise, I reckon that an organisation like IIP is essential in any developed economy.

While at IIP, Spellman oversaw some suitable initiatives, such as the setting up of an HCM Standards Group and research such as Measures of workforce capability for future performance.

Managerial skills in the UK are not good - hence my recently invented category Ghastly farragoes of UK incompetence (slim, but bound to grow) - so it’s a good time for someone like Spellman to come to the helm, as the appointment press release suggests in the opening paragraph:

Ruth intends to use her position to call for a greater focus on the high level skills needed to build UK competitiveness and productivity. She will also call on employers to take greater responsibility for the development of their management and leadership teams, so that UK organisations are better equipped to meet the conflicting demands of Generations X, Y and Z as the ‘multi-generational’ workforce becomes a reality.

Good luck, Ms Spellman. The UK watches with interest.

… no, of course the UK government didn’t say that. But it might as well after this week’s news.

You see, it turns out that Donald Clark is clairvoyant.

That was the thought that ran through my mind when I read this headline recently in the UK’s leading HR weekly, Personnel Today:

Employer relief as mandatory Level 2 training threat is put back five years

Donald predicted exactly this almost exactly a year ago…

I had written a blog entry entitled: The Leitch Review and Skills Pledges – a nightmare scenario in which I foretold horror if mandatory training for the low-skilled was introduced.

Donald Clark coolly tapped out these lines in response:

No one is taking the Sword of Dasmocles (threat of compulsion in 2011) very seriosuly. They know that this thereat will diseappear with a new government, be ignored by the present government, be watered down so that some sort of ‘government pays-employers train’ scheme is in place.

Compulsion is NOT the answer. It will result in a lot of ‘tick-box’ training that may end up reducing the productivity of companies.

[Spelling as per the original.]

Well, perhaps he isn’t so clairvoyant, and perhaps my original post was a little melodramatic. Employer pressure and the possible legislative and political fall out of a complex mandatory system were always going to prove too much strain on obligatory training. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (CES) will now report on the possible need for statutory training in 2014-15, instead of 2010, as planned.

Report in 2014? In anyone’s book that spells ‘kicked into the long grass’.

But it’s not the end of the issue. We still have skills problems, and most employers still don’t want to take a hand in solving them. Only 13% of UK employers have apparently signed the skills pledge with the threat of mandatory training in the distance. What’s to make them do that now, or to take skills any more seriously? This failed initiative of the skills pledge coupled to the possibility of mandatory training may have done more harm than good by persuading employers that it’s enough to stick in their heels.

While the establishment of the CES under BT chairman Sir Michael Rake is one ray of light, the whole UK skills issue runs the risk of becoming like our weather: something everyone like to moan about, something we can perhaps even predict. But not something we believe we can change.

If that’s too depressing, and you need cheering up this Friday, you may want to check out a recent joke of Donald’s, and certainly his recommended piece of spoof sensitivity training from You Tube.