My remarks will draw upon two research studies that Global Learning Services undertook for the National Centre for Vocational Education Research NCVER). These studies were:

• VET in the Learning Age (1999)
• Building a Learning and Training Culture: the Experience of Five OECD Countries (2000).

The latter study examined policies adopted in Britain, United States, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands.

In my remarks I will develop the case that a new approach is needed for skill formation in Australia in the present context which is marked by the impact of globalisation, rampant technologies, dramatic changes in the workplace, and by the exponential pace of change and the blurring of many traditional boundaries.

I will address this question in terms of four critical challenges that we need to consider.

• In doing this we face the further challenge that Australia has no national policy for lifelong learning, unlike countries such as Britain, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands
• This question involves addressing cultural barriers and finding ways to bring about cultural change. It also involves furthering the principle of shared responsibility.
• This has been a neglected area of training reform over the past decade with the dominant approach to competency based training. It is also relevant to note that the Mayer Committee put aside values, attitudes, and personal attributes in constructing its set of essential key competencies.
• These issues go to the question of how we build up a culture that values and promotes, learning, skill, and enterprise, and which supports individuals and firms in adapting to changing conditions.

1.  The first of these challenges relates to the impact of pressures for lifelong and the need to integrate strategies for lifelong learning and skill formation.
2. The second challenge derives from the fact that learning occurs in many contexts such as the workplace, institutions, home, clubs, and a learning society is essentially a partnership society. The second challenge is how we build the necessary collaboration and partnerships.
3. We also need to identify what are the essential skills for the new economy and find ways to foster these in education and training systems, and in the workplace.
4. The fourth challenge is closely related to the third and involves how we approach questions of values and personal attributes in developing a national skills agenda for the information society of the 21st century.

The Learning Challenge
I turn firstly to the learning challenge.
There has been since the mid 1990s an upsurge of interest in lifelong learning in leading OECD countries driven primarily by the economic shifts I have mentioned, including the impact of technological change and the pace of change.

International agencies such as OECD, UNESCO, the European Commission have all given priority to lifelong learning issues and the Group of Eight leading developed countries recognised the significance of these issues in adopting the Cologne charter on lifelong learning at its Cologne meeting last year.

Some national governments, such as those of Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have adopted national policies for lifelong learning. But not Australia.

Britain provides an example of a country attempting to bring about a learning revolution, in effect a cultural revolution, through government initiated action.

This action includes a Government Green Paper in early 1998 which set out the Government's vision of Britain as a learning society, and which indicated some of the necessary policies, followed by a White Paper in 1999 which set out a number of structural reforms.

I will refer to the partnership aspect of the British approach in discussing the second challenge I have mentioned. Some examples of the policies instituted by Britain include:

• a University for Industry with a network of learning centres across Britain under public/private partnership arrangements;
• a system of individual learning accounts to provide incentives for individuals to invest in their own learning on a whole-of-life basis;
• a system of national learning targets to be achieved by 2002.

In addition to these initiatives, Britain is seeking to integrated learning and skill strategies through a national network of Learning and Skill Councils that I will discuss later. A further key feature of the British approach is an attempt at a holistic approach through "joined-up" policies across a range of sectors.

The absence of a national policy for lifelong learning makes this a difficult challenge for Australia although some interesting developments are now occurring at a state level in some states.

The Partnership Challenge
Consideration of strategies to link learning and skill inevitably flow across into the key role of partnership strategies in furthering this objective, so I turn now to the second challenge : that of fostering collaboration and partnership among all stakeholders : employers, government, education institutions, individuals, and communities.

There are two aspects to the things we observed in the five country study:

1. government initiatives;
2. private initiatives.

Both are significant, and much government policy in Britain and America is directed at encouraging and supporting private initiatives.

I will comment first on government initiatives. The thing that stood out is the way governments are using infrastructure policies to build collaboration and partnership at a local level. This has long been the case in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and is a product of the consensual policy approach that is a feature of these countries, but there has been significant development of infrastructure policies in both Britain and the United states over the past decade to build networks, collaboration, and partnerships for learning and skill development. Or in other words, building social capital to encourage investment in human capital.

In the case of the United States:

• The 1993 School to Work Act has funded local school to work partnerships and by 1997 there were more than 1,100 STW partnerships across America.
• The 1998 Workforce Investment Act provides for local Workforce Investment Boards, with a majority of business and industry members which are responsible for funds under 9 federal programs. The boards foster workforce investment and skill formation in the local area.

While these infrastructure policies have encouraged partnership building, a feature of the American scene is the extent of private initiatives in building alliances and partnerships. This appears to reflect the strong entrepreneurial and community oriented traditions in American culture. A number of foundations are active in supporting education reform and partnership building, in some cases with a special focus. For example, the Annenberg Institute on Public Engagement for Public Education has supported school/community partnership building.

A further feature of the American scene is the active role of business and industry associations, and a range of other intermediary bodies. For example, the National Alliance of Business has on-line connections with some 800 business/education partnerships across America and both the US Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers are active.

Concern at skill shortages led Vice President Al Gore to convene a White House Summit in January last year to address lifelong learning and skill needs. Following the summit, a Leadership Group was established to suggest practical ways to address the issues. The Leadership Group reported last November in a report with three dominant themes:

1. Raise standards in all education sectors in order to meet labour market needs.
2. Increase awareness and motivation of all Americans to participate in education, training, and learning.
3. Continue to build partnerships for these purposes.

The report gave examples of many types of partnership that were emerging across America.

Much of the current action in America is driven by a widely held view that America faces permanent skill shortages and that the workforce was grossly unprepared for the skill needs of the new economy. These themes are reflected in influential reports from the Council on Competitiveness and the American Conference Board.

The Council's first hand look at efforts to meet the skills challenge validates a
simple but fundamental point : the demand for increased skill is rising much
than the capacity of US companies, workers, and the nation's education system
to respond.
Council on Competitiveness, 1998
Throughout the United States, private and public-sector companies are facing the
problem of a workforce severely lacking in basic skills: more than 40 per cent of
The US workforce and more than 50 percent of high school graduates do not have
the basic skills to do their job
The Conference Board, 1999

Britain
A similar pattern may be observed in Britain.
The British Government has been using infrastructure policies to build networks and partnerships.

1. A national network of Lifelong Learning Partnerships has been mandated across Britain with local education authorities, further education colleges, and the Career Service required to be members, and with other stakeholders able to be included. The partnerships will identify local learning and skill needs and will institute an on-going dialogue on ways to meet these needs.
2. Secondly, a national network of local Learning and Skills Councils will come into operation next April replacing the current Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) These bodies will have funding powers to fund Modern Apprenticeships, Further education colleges, and to support desirable local developments. The Councils will relate their work to Regional Economic Development bodies.

As in America, private initiatives to build partnerships are also significant. A particular feature of the British scene is the emergence of a national network of Learning Cities with over 40 towns and cities initiating action to develop as learning communities built on a network of partnerships. The committed Learning Cities include Glasgow, Edinburg, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, Norwich, Liverpool.

British learning cities are stimulating considerable innovation in linking social, economic, educational, and cultural objectives in a world of blur where new relationships between these domains are emerging. For example, Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Economic Development Agency, has its four strategic objectives:

• Competitive place,
• learning and enterprise,
• inclusion and
• innovative far sighted enterprises.

There is now a growing interest in the learning community strategy in Australia and the Victorian Government is funding nine towns and cities to develop as Learning Towns. These include Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Albury Wodonga, as well as smaller communities. Albury Wodonga is hosting the first national conference on Learning Cities in two weeks time and is a prime example of local initiative to build a learning culture through vision, leadership , and enterprise other Australian cities such as Brisbane, Toowoomba, and the Salisbury area of Adelaide are also interested in this strategy for regenerating and revitalising communities.

It is seemingly paradoxical that in a world of globalisation, localisation policies and local initiatives appear to becoming increasingly significant. The reasons appear to link to such motives as the need for speed of response in skilling the workforce, the growing diversity in labour markets, the need to link learning and skill strategies, the value of building up social capital in regions, and the impact of all these things on investment in human capital in a knowledge based economy.

Building local infrastructure and partnerships is clearly one of the foundations for a new approach to skill formation in Australia. However, given our history, federal system, and tradition of centralised administration of services such as education and health, and the limited development of local infrastructures such as I have mentioned, the task appears a large one. Is there an Australian way to build the kind of collaboration and partnership we observed across the five countries we studied. We also need to recognise that strongly entrenched cultural barriers exist to such development.

What Are the Essential Skills for the New Economy and how do we Foster Them?
What are the essential skills for the new economy and how do we foster them?

The British Government is currently developing a National Skills Agenda and recently received the report of its National Skills Task Force that had been established to advise on the National Agenda.

In its report the Task Force identified three categories of necessary skills:

• vocational skills, generic skills, and personal attributes.

It is interesting to regard personal attributes as skills, in particular given the approach to competency based training that we have adopted in Australia over the past decade.

I will focus my remarks on generic skills and personal attributes as the skill categories are the most relevant to our discussion.

• Generic skills are the broad transferable skills which are increasingly regarded as essential to maintain employability and which are relevant to most work, as well as being life skills.
• In Australia they are best known through the Mayer key competencies (communication, problem solving, using technology, working in teams, using mathematical ideas, organising information)

While the Mayer key competencies have been useful, there have been significant changes in the context of education and training since 1992, and it is time to revisit these generic competencies and to consider whether Mayer got it right.

When we do this, a number of issues stand out.

1. The competency based approach adopted by the Mayer committee meant that the Committee precluded the inclusion of values and attitudes.
2. They rejected the Finn Committee proposal for cultural understanding as an essential competency on the grounds that this was a body of knowledge and not a competency.
3. Enterprise skills were not included and creativity played a minor part in distinguishing between levels.
4. Learning to learn was not regarded as a key competency.

The latter points reflect developments since Mayer, such as the Karpin report on management with its central theme about building an enterprise culture in Australia, the resurgence of interest in innovation with the recent Innovation Summit, and a wider recognition of the mounting imperatives for lifelong learning.

In revisiting Mayer it is useful to look across the seas to both America and Britain, and I would like to draw upon reports from each country.

In America a counterpart body to Mayer, the SCANS Commission was operating at the same time as the Mayer Committee. Unlike the Mayer Committee, however, the SCANS Commission took more account of personal attributes and values, and a whole of life approach, rather than a sectoral perspective.

The SCANS Commission divided its prescription for essential Workplace Know-How into two categories.
Foundations

Basic skills: reading, writing, speaking, mathematics, listening
Thinking skills: the ability to learn, to reason, to think creatively, to make decisions, to solve problems
Personal qualities: individual responsibility, self-esteem and self-management, sociability, and integrity.

You will see that there are some interesting inclusions (integrity? sociability?)
Are these foundations still relevant in the year 2000?

In addition to these foundations, the SCANS Commission also identified six workplace competencies: resources, interpersonal skills, information, systems, and technology.

It is worth noting that the foundations concept used by the SCANS Commission has been picked up by OECD in its work on lifelong learning with certain essential foundations needed to be acquired by all as a basis for lifelong learning. This was a theme we explored in our five country study.

A further ingredient to take into account in a re-appraisal of essential generic skills is that we know now more about the way key competencies operate in practice than was the case in 1992. Evaluation of key competency pilot projects has shown certain major characteristics of key competencies:

• they cluster in actual learning and work situations;
• they are highly sensitive to contextual factors;
• they can be thought of as a process as well as an outcome;
• they are developmental.

I suggest then that we think of the key generic skills as developmental clusters that overlap and interact with each other in progressing personal development and competence.

Having regard to these characteristics, I will suggest five clusters of generic skills and personal attributes for the new economy. Firstly, I will add to the Mayer set of competencies enterprise skills and creativity. Following the Karpin Report proposals for building an enterprise culture in Australia, the Commonwealth has funded an enterprise education program in schools with somewhat mixed results so far.

But what are the enterprise skills?

OECD in 1989 defined enterprise skills in this way:
These encompass those personal dispositions, abilities, and competencies related to creativity, initiative, problem solving, flexibility, adaptability, the taking and discharging of responsibility, and knowing how to learn and unlearn.

You will see the overlap to the other clusters of generic skills

The OECD report also added:
An enterprising individual is active, confident, and purposeful, not passive, uncertain, and dependent.

The Australian Ministerial Council (MCEETYA) defined enterprise education in a somewhat similar way.
Enterprise education is directed towards achieving a learning culture which will result in greater numbers of students equipped and enthused to identify, create, initiate and successfully manage personal, business, work, and community opportunities.

Are these the skills required by the new economy? I would like to add one more piece before I sum up my views on the generic skills and personal attributes required for success in the new economy.

What are the most important assets in the new economy? In answering this question I would like to quote a sentence from a recent British White Paper on Building the Knowledge Driven Economy.
In the global marketplace, knowledge, skills and creativity are needed above all to give the UK a competitive edge. These are the distinctive assets of knowledge driven economy.

I would only add enterprise (or an entrepreneurial spirit if you like) to this set of key assets for the knowledge-based economy. So in developing skill strategies for the new economy we must find ways to build linkages between these strategies and the generation, management, and use of knowledge, enterprise, innovation, and creativity.

This means that we must be deeply concerned with the culture of our firms, our education institutions, our communities, and our nation, because culture, our values and attitudes – our mental models, can foster or impede the development of these national assets for the new economy.

This is why I am very interested in initiatives to build learning towns and cities in various parts of Australia – such as with the present Victorian initiative to fund nine learning towns- because in promoting social capital in this way and building partnerships around a shared vision, we are encouraging and providing incentives for the necessary investment in human capital.

If I may sum up my remarks on what I see as the necessary generic skills and personal attributes for the new economy. At present I envisage this as three to five overlapping circles or clusters of skills and attributes.

1. a cluster centred on motivation and capacity to learn and adaptability skills;
2. a cluster encompassing the enterprise and creativity skills;

The option then exists of retaining the Mayer key competencies with the addition of cultural understanding, or looking inside the Mayer key competencies and reformulating them in terms of the three components they contain. If we do the latter, three clusters emerge:

1. a cognitive cluster encompassing the thinking and reasoning skills which picks up the Mayer problem solving competence;
2. a cluster of interpersonal skills which incorporates communication, team skills, customer focus, and cultural understanding;
3. a cluster which picks up the Mayer planning and organising activities which might be termed work readiness and work habits, and which also picks up the requirement for practicability and a business orientation identified in the Allen Group survey of 350 firms.Should we add understanding of systems relationships as the Allen Group study did and which is also included in the original SCANS formulation, In our VET in the Learning Age report we called this "helicopter vision" and included it in our profile of a lifelong learner. What of the foundation basic skills that were also included in the Allen Group snapshot and in the SCANS set?

Each cluster would be developmental and provide a basis for lifelong learning and personal development: a continuum extending from schooling through VET and higher education into workplace learning and life so that "learning as a way of being" might become a reality in building a learning culture in Australia and progressing Australia towards becoming a competitive, innovative, cohesive learning society..

Have I missed any essential generic skills or personal attributes required by the new economy? I welcome your comment. Each of my clusters would include personal attributes and values as well as the things we more commonly think of as skills.

The developmental character of the clusters would be significant in that skills would continue to be enhanced throughout life. For example, the cluster centred on motivation and capacity to learn would enhance adaptability skills and would lead in the direction of what Peter Senge has termed person mastery.
Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, although it is grounded in competence and skills. It goes beyond spiritual unfolding or opening, although it requires spiritual growth. It means approaching one's life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to reactive viewpoint,

If you agree with my list of essential generic skills and personal attributes, the further question then follows as to how we foster these skills through the education and training system and workplace learning. This will require considerable change in the work of schools and VET institutions with changes to teaching and learning strategies so that schools truly become learning communities (a goal recognised by State and Commonwealth Ministers in the Adelaide Declaration of 1999 on National Goals for Schooling in the 21st Century), and VET institutions as learning organisations that mirror the characteristics of high performance workplaces. Modern technologies can be a major ally in these transformations from teaching to learning directed at the key generic skills I have discussed.

I conclude by summing up the things that I believe should be in a national skills agenda for Australia relevant to 21st century conditions.

1. Strategies to build a broader, deeper, and more flexible portfolio of skills for all
2. Workplace skills should be underpinned by essential foundations (perhaps along the lines of the SCANS foundations) that provide everyone with a capability for lifelong learning and personal development, maintaining employability, and adapting to change.
3. Values and personal attributes will be brought into this broader framework for lifelong learning and skilling.
4. Enterprise skills, creativity, willingness and capacity to learn, and adaptability skills will be essential parts of the mix.
5. This will require a convergence of general and vocational education to drive these developments.
6. Higher order cognitive skills will be emphasised in vocational education and training as well as in higher education.
7. Strategies will be in place to build partnerships among stakeholders and a sense of shared responsibility.
8. Appropriate learning strategies will be promoted which will include innovative uses of modern learning technologies.

The components in a national skills agenda for the new economy I have discussed will be linked to a shared vision of Australia as a competitive, cohesive learning society. How we achieve such a shared vision is a question that warrants our close attention.