勞埃德（2002）在高級技術部門做了一個有關投資方在培訓和發展部門低度投資的研究。她選擇了航空航天和制藥公司來進行調查，試圖能夠鑒定出在這些企業中，員工所需要的技能發展都是否被滿足。然而，這一研究存在一些局限性值得考量。本篇評dissertation章是基于勞埃德的文章，本文的發展也是通過其文章的理念，研究方法和主要發現來進行的。

本文說明了整頓在“知識經濟”的員工培訓是十分關鍵且重要的；但是由于老板在培訓方面的投資短缺，這一政策未能如愿執行。培訓無需花費且效果良好，但是由于擔憂同行竊取，造成打開市場的失敗，員工沒有受到充分的培訓。作者在兩個高級技術部門進行了一項研究，為的是發現這兩家企業能否就最佳培訓和發展給出一個更好的解決方法。

研究發現，盡管這些公司有著令人滿意的產品市場地位，但是他們卻不能夠充分的培訓他們的員工。其培訓的結構是臨時的，并且對從事體力勞動的員工，在日復一日的工作中，總是以各種各樣的借口根本不培訓他們。

Lloyd (2002) conducted a study on employers’ underinvestment in training and development in “high skill” sectors. She chose aerospace and pharmaceutical firms for her research and attempted to identify whether the employees’ needs of skill developments in these firms were appropriately fulfilled or not. However, some limitations should be thought over. This critique is based on Lloyd’s article and is developed through its literature concepts, research methodologies and main findings.

The article explains that in order compete in the ‘knowledge economy’ training of workforce is of key importance; however the policy has failed to acknowledge the cause for employer’s lack of investment in training. Training is ‘good’ and incurs cost, but is not being provided adequately for the fear of poaching, thus creating a market failure. The author undertakes a research in two high skill sector firms in order to find, if they can provide a better solution, for the optimal training and development.

It was found that although these firms have favourable product market position but they were unable to adequately train their workers. The structure of training was ad hoc, and training for manual workers was not taking place with the excuse of interruption in day-to-day work.

Although qualified staff was given a chance to further hone their skills, but even this occurred at a significantly low rate.The author states that in order to compete in the new ‘knowledge economy’ the employees have to hone their skills by vocational training and development, as producing high value added products, in a time when technology is changing at a very swift pace, is extremely vital for the economy. Lloyd (2005:1) mentions in her article that the Department of Trade & Industry supports this notion as ‘Our country needs highly skilled employees, high calibre managers, forward looking unions and knowledgeable consumers working together to produce ever smarter goods and services’ (DTI, 2003: 1). The author mentions about ‘improving the levels of workforce skills’ (Lloyd, 2002:64) however, no explanations are provided as to what the contents of these improved skills are and how to identify skill deficit.#p#分頁標題#e#

What criterion is there for distinguishing between high skill and low skill? Is it the academic or the technical qualification, generic or specific skill or a lifelong experience which makes the difference? And by what means the degree of improvement can be measured? This is something which goes unanswered. Sloane, O’Leary and Watson in their economic report to the Economic Research Unit Welsh Assembly Government (Tender Contract No. 99/2005) explain the concept of skill as multi-dimensional which includes entire collection of abilities and attitudes that can be combined in different proportions in different jobs. And so there are a number of ways to measure skill including basic skills, qualifications, (elementary) occupations or pay level and each can give quite different indications of skills deficits. They also state that UK has a high proportion of its working population with poor basic skills of numeracy and literacy.

By Highlighting that many commentators including Finegold & Soskice (1988); Keep & Mayhew, (1996) consider the training failure as systematic, thus reflecting Britain as low skills economy, the author attempts to strengthen her argument that primarily employers are competing in low value added and standardised markets where skilled workforce is not required. This seems to be quite true as Felstead et al’s (2002) extensive survey about work skills in Britain shows that most jobs in the UK do not require skilled people to carry them out. Even when the number of jobs that require higher level qualifications are added to those that demand intermediate ones, they are still outnumbered by posts for people with few or no qualifications (11 million and 13.3 million respectively (Felstead et al, 2002: 104)). However, this contradicts with Leitch’s findings that according to, a comparison by OECD of 30 countries, UK lies 17th on low skills, 20th on intermediate and 11th on high skills (Leitch Review of Skills 2006). This shows that UK’s high skill sectors are significantly doing well in relation to international comparison.

The author illustrates about the criticism UK has been facing regarding its low levels of workplace training and development, and brings forward the view that although there has been improvement in training during the previous 2 decades but has been balanced out. This is supported by the evidence provided by Leitch in his review that historically UK’s skill base has been weak due to long lasting failures in training and educational systems, but over recent years the skill base has been improved significantly with more and more people going to university and an improvement in skills of adults. Despite this improvement the review found that UK’s skill base remains average by international standards (Leitch Review of Skills 2006).

The author’s view about under investment as an act of market failure, states that lack of access to resources and imperfect information are causes of market failure. However this idea could have been elaborated if other potential sources of market failure, as explained by Bishop, (1993), real externalities, tax included distortions, liquidity constraints and government regulation interventions, which also lead to discourage training activities, were discussed as well. Nevertheless she clearly explains how market failure exists due to reluctance of firms investing in generic skills and the problem of firms poaching workers, therefore firms choose not to train or only train for specific skills. The supporting evidence for this claim is spotted by (Lynch and Black, 1998) where they mention it as poaching or ‘cherry-picking’ problem. The idea states that although general training is useful for the employer who trains but it is equally useful for other employers as well, so there is a high probability that trained workers may take their acquired skills to other employers thus encouraging high labour turnover. On the other hand specific training is associated with increased worker productivity for the employer who provided the training (Sieben, 2007). Thus specific training is directly associated with lower levels of turnover.#p#分頁標題#e#

The electronics industry survey in Lloyd’s article offers a very fair view that firms not training their highly qualified workers may be a cause for their high labour turnover. Lynch and Black, 1998 states that Training is more likely to be received by more educated workers, managerial and professional employees and employees in larger firms. So it can be assumed that training is more welcomed by highly qualified workers rather than low skilled workers.

The author supports the analysis by Finegold and Soskice’s (1998) that UK is trapped in low skill equilibrium, and as pointed by Sloace, O’Leary and Watson that advocates of this notion view a large number of employers in UK as not wanting or needing skilled workers. They argue that it would be a rational response of many managers if they adapt a low skill form of work organisation and would be in accordance with the then prevailing market conditions. They refer firms which are providing a lower quantity and quality of training to be associated with the Britain’s failure to train. This is questionable on the grounds that how relevant these factors are today since this does not reflect the current situation in Britain. . The DTI report (Wilson and Hogarth, 2003) describes the low skills equilibrium as a situation in which the economy is trapped in a vicious circle of low value added, low skills and low wages. However when discussing the skills problem in a broader view, (Leitch, 2005) describes the overall skills problem as “We have considerable weaknesses. More than one-third of adults do not hold the equivalent of a basic school leaving qualification. Almost half of adults are not functionally numerate and one-sixth are not functionally literate. This is worse than our principal comparator nations. Improving our schools will not solve these problems. Today over 70 per cent of our 2020 workforce has already completed their compulsory education. Our intermediate and technical skills lag countries such as France and Germany.” This is very much in line with the author’s view.

The authors research was based on 2 high skilled firms with a view that there is much likelihood that there is little training and development activities undertaken and there is quite much possibility that these so called ‘high skill firms’ are providing sub-optimal levels of training activities. The purpose of this research as the author states is to evaluate how far training and development is suitable to each firm’s competitive strategy. This seems to be very appropriate as, essentially, a high skills economy requires not only skilled workers but also skilled work, together with sufficient power and discretion for those skills to be exercised. It is that interaction that is the focus of this special issue. (Grugulis, 2003)

The research was conducted through surveys and in-depth semi structured interviews with the staff of both high skilled industries focusing mainly as to how sufficient the employees thought the training they received were and what future options existed for the further development of their skills.#p#分頁標題#e#

The survey was quite thorough in terms that the interviews were carried out at all levels of the employment from the senior managers to the shop floor workers

(2002: 68). However, there are several limitations related to this current research method, which must be taken into account before analyzing the results of this survey.

Firstly, the methodologies used in these researches appear to be largely qualitative in nature as they were not analyzed with any statistical technique. The authenticity of the sample size cannot be guaranteed since there are no means to measure its reliability and since this research seems to be more qualitative in nature it can be assumed that it is not the true representative of the whole population, as it is the quantitative methodology which incorporate, although less in-depth but, more breadth of information across a large number of cases. According to Sullivan and Delucia (2010) small sample sizes can lead to significantly unreliable data. Therefore the method undertaken appears to be not reliable enough since, to gather the most comprehensive, accurate and unbiased results, a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques should have been used (Murphy, 2006).

Furthermore, the aerospace plant was already plagued by decentralised financial accountability, limited divisional resources and had a very small corporate centre. According to Lloyd, the HR manager explained that the business did not have sufficient resources to provide in-house training (2002:69).In addition the “Pharmaco” was sold off and this caused the redundancy of 250 employees. This fact makes obvious that the expenses for the training of the staff would be confined. Due to the fact that both companies were lacking resources, it is questionable whether the author was right in choosing these firms as her case study.

Moreover, another challenge to Lloyd’s research is that she used only the interviews to conduct her research. This method however is not sufficient and reliable enough in determining why ‘high skill’ businesses in the UK do not invest adequately in their own skills and training. According to Bryman and Bell (2007), to get a more consistent and unbiased result, more methods such as questionnaires, internet surveys, and so on should be taken into consideration. Nevertheless she was able to gather information on technology, worker characteristics and capital intensity which seem to add value to the authenticity of her research.

There appears to be another disadvantage related to the semi-structure interviews. The result of the interviews is dependent on the skill of the interviewers, how they react during the process and what types of questions are being asked, especially if the interviewees are asked close ended and leading questions. Here, the reliability of the given answers is doubtful because of the potential influence by the interviewer, such as unconscious signals and the structure of the questions that may lead the respondent to give expected answers or answers which give biased or slanted information. And since the article does not provide any information about types of questions being asked, the authenticity of the results may subject to question.#p#分頁標題#e#

On the other hand there are researches which confirm Lloyd’s perspective about the leadership of the high skill industries like Aerospace in the training sector in spite of the deficiencies which are existed.A survey of the aerospace sector by the National training Organization for Engineering Manufacture (EMTA) reveals that 58 per cent of aerospace firms pay for both on and off-the-job training, compared with the manufacturing industry average of 47 per cent. However despite the sector's efforts to develop staff, the report finds that almost a quarter of aerospace firms are still suffering from skills shortages.

The author finds quite similar issues for manual workers in both firms. The results showed that one possible cause of limited training could be the inconsistent role of the line managers who wanted work to be completed on time. This is quite factual, since releasing the staff from work is a typical problem for managers because it interferes day to day running of the service. This is a potential reasoning for workers not being able to get time for study or attending courses, and therefore more emphasis was placed on qualified staff to be trained which is not too much involved in day-to-day activities.(Rainbird and Munro, 2003)

The key problems regarding on the job training as mentioned by the author are very genuine, however the benefits also hold much importance to be discussed in this context. First of all this kind of training is more cost effective, and organisations such as aerospace which face financial constraints can find such training very useful, Moreover in such a training environment employees may be more confident about what they are doing, since they are supervised by people they already know, which in turn can lead to increased productivity.

According to the author’s findings the managers do not realise the significance of training in the long run and they delegate the responsibility of training to the lower level managers without giving them adequate authority to exercise their responsibility. It is very much agreeable as the research states these facts, the managers were quite short sighted in their approach to training and in order to put things on the smooth run the managers should be realising the true importance of investment in training and the benefits gained from them.

In short the author has attempted to find out the reasons why even high skill sectors cannot provide and exemplary solution for the under investment prevailing in the training sector. Although the author has covered various aspects in quite detail, and was able to highlight significant problems due to which the firms were unable to provide adequate training but she never provided with any solution for this dilemma, or any suitable measures by which government can actually help the country to overcome its low skills economy problem.