Actividades económicas y productivas

Building on the groundwork laid by Spenner, and initially overlapping with that work, researchers in the UK have collected twenty years of data specifically focused on self- report by employees on how skill is used in the workplace. The data come from five surveys conducted between 1986 and 2006:

• Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI) (1986)

• Employment in Britain (1992)

• 1997 Skills Survey

• 2001 Skills Survey

• 2006 Skills Survey.

All five surveys have been carried out by independent academics and funded by different combinations of national and regional government and industry bodies. They are cross- sectional household surveys of employed adults, with an achieved sample of around 4,800 individuals in the 2006 round. They were not originally planned as a coherent series, vary in their primary purpose and focus and draw a new sample for each run. However,

successive surveys have intentionally built on the previous ones to preserve data continuity while progressively increasing the breadth and depth of the dataset (Felstead, Gallie, Green and Zhou, 2007: 2).

Following Spenner’s model set out in Chapter 3, all five surveys have collected data on aspects of job complexity, and those conducted since 1992 have also contained questions on task discretion. The data they record on job complexity are considerably more extensive than those in HILDA, and do not contain any directly comparable questions except for one in the 1992, 2001 and 2006 runs which is virtually identical to NUSKILLS. A second question addresses another component of work-based learning by asking respondents whether they need to help their colleagues learn. To capture the preparatory learning requirement (“broad skills”) questions are asked on:

• required qualifications;

• duration of the on-the-job training required to be come fully proficient;

• time needed in a job to learn to do it properly.

A second major component of the surveys gathers direct evidence on both substantive complexity and technical job content by asking respondents to rate the importance for their job of 35 generic types of skill, increased to 40 for 2006. This is an attempt to cover the job analysis element of DOT and O*Net in a simplified form. Principal component analysis was used to convert these individual items into composite scores on ten kinds of generic skill: literacy, physical, number, technical know-how, influence, planning, client

communication, horizontal communication, problem-solving, checking, aesthetic and emotional. The last two of these broader categories were used only in the 2006 survey.

Additional questions were asked about more specific skills in computing, foreign languages and where relevant, management (Felstead et al 2007: 26-35, 95-119).

The third key component, the questions on task discretion, is sufficiently similar to permit fairly reliable comparison with HILDA. However, it must be borne in mind that the task discretion questions in the UK surveys relate only to individual discretion (Gallie, Felstead and Green 2004: 249), whereas those in HILDA include other forms of influence, including collective or consultative input to decision-making.

The indicators in each of these areas have been combined into an index, based on principal component analysis, and these indices rather than the constituent variables are used as the dependent or analysis variables, as required, in most of the published analyses.

Over the period 1986-2006 these surveys have tracked a steady rise in the requirement for skill across most jobs, though growth slowed after 2001. This was primarily apparent in a growing requirement for formal qualifications at all levels, though this is counterbalanced by evidence of possible credentialism (Felstead, Gallie and Green 2002: 11), especially at lower levels in the qualifications framework where the policies of successive governments have favoured a rapid expansion of formal certification, mostly through recognition of prior learning, in jobs previously treated as unskilled (Keep, Mayhew and Payne 2006).

However, the trend has been apparent in more robust indicators such as training time and the amount of time required in a job to learn to do it properly. A different kind of skill growth is evident in the need to keep learning new skills on the job, which has shown fairly uniform growth over the two decades and is the only key indicator not to have plateaued since 2001. These latter trends are seen as marking a growing role for learning in the workplace as opposed to formal training (Felstead et al 2007: x).

In general, the rise in skill requirement has remained broadly in line with the occupational hierarchy, meaning that the relativities between different levels have changed little. In particular, there is little evidence of progress in meeting the need for a major expansion of middle-level skills that was identified by the NIESR matched case-study research in the 1980s and 90s (Steedman, Mason and Wagner 1991). While most generic skills appear to be increasingly required, the only ones to carry a significant wage premium across the board are computer skills and the category of higher-level communication and planning skills characterised as “influencing skills”.

On the negative side, despite growing indications that workers expect to use skill and initiative in their jobs, the task discretion index showed a strong decline up to 2001, with the mean score on the variables which correspond broadly to WHATDO and OWNTASK dropping by 25% and 28% respectively between 1992 and 2001, though the decline has since levelled off. It was most pronounced for professionals, and considerably more

pronounced for part-time workers. Unlike HILDA, these surveys provide some insight into the sources of declining task discretion, and show that much of the decline was due to an increase in the constraints imposed on individual decision-making latitude by fellow- workers (Felstead, Gallie and Green 2002: 13). In other words, a significant part of the decline is due to factors that would be attributed in the analysis framework for this thesis to a more interactive style of work, and hence to a need for stronger cooperation skills.

With such a relatively long run of data it is easier to identify the periods of faster and slower change over the twenty years. The pattern on the broad skill indices differs

according to the aspect of learning involved. The learning time index shows the steadiest growth, an almost linear if gentle rise from 1986 to 2006. The required qualifications index rose between 1986 and 1992, plateaued in 1997, rose again in 2001 and levelled out

thereafter, 2006 being the first year in the series which actually saw a growth in the number of jobs requiring no formal qualifications. Training time peaked in 1997, dropped sharply in 2001 and rose back to just above its 1997 level. Generally speaking growth seems to have been strongest in the early and mid-1990s, and virtually all indicators, including task discretion, level off between 2001 and 2006. By contrast, as already noted, the indicator of work-based learning, equivalent to NUSKILLS, shows strong and relatively even growth across the three waves for which data exist, the percentage who strongly agreed or agreed rising from 76.2 in 1992 to 81.3 in 2001, and again to 82.5 in 2006.

The UK skills surveys are an exceptionally rich resource, and this very summary account of their findings, which covers only those aspects in which they provide data directly

comparable with HILDA, does nothing like justice to the range and usefulness of the information they provide. This account is intended only to set the context for the research in this thesis by summarising the sources which represent direct precedents for the analyses carried out here. However, they serve to illustrate the inadequacy of the data currently available on the dynamic and outputs of Australia’s NSS, and Chapter 10 will return to the question of what parts of them could usefully be duplicated for Australia, either in future waves of HILDA or in some other source.