Skill programmes “poorly understood”

Citation

(2004), "Skill programmes “poorly understood”", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 36 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2004.03736cab.007

Skill programmes “poorly understood”

Skill programmes “poorly understood”

An alarming gap exists in how well government- funded skill programmes are understood by UK companies, research for the 2004 Learning Technologies Conference has discovered.

At an online meeting of company training managers, including representatives from some of the UK's largest employers, 93 per cent had not secured government funding for any of their training initiatives in the last 4 years.

Donald Taylor, Learning Technologies Conference Chairman, believes that this is because of lack of knowledge about the funding available and not a lack of funding itself. “We found that UK companies are generally unaware of the programmes available and how to attract funding from them,” he said. “We discovered, for example, that 86 per cent did not know about employer- training pilots, 50 per cent were unaware of modern apprenticeships and none of the training managers we spoke to were aware of the home- computing initiative.”

He continued: “Money and support for skills development are available for companies in far greater amounts than in the past, but there are many different programmes and ways to attract it. The Learning Technologies Conference helped learning and development professionals to understand the UK Government's skill strategy and how companies can engage with it.”