Last week I turned down an opportunity to do a government funded NVQ Business Administration training programme.  My reasons for this stretch beyond laziness and arrogance.

First of all, weighing in rather close to the arrogance side of things, I would feel sorry for the NVQ level 2 when it had to hang around with some of my other qualifications that are bigger and meaner and would pick on the poor thing.  However, this was not my only reason.  Any qualification is at least a qualification, it could look ok on a CV, and free training is after all free training.  Of course, in this case, it wasn’t really training.

I did sign up for the programme after seeing the list of modules that were available.  Some of them were ridiculous affairs like a module in “complying with health and safety” or “Being punctual:  Getting up that five minutes earlier”, but some of them looked quite useful, such as modules on the more advanced features of Microsoft Word or Excel, with which I sometimes find I have gaps in my knowledge.  However, the main reason for me deciding to abandon the venture was that I’d misunderstood what was meant by “optional units”.  What happens is that an assessor comes and follows you for a few days whilst you’re doing your job, works out what you do, and then signs you up for the modules most relevant for your work, or rather, signs you up for modules that you can not learn anything from as you do the content on a daily basis.  This to me sounds like a reversal of the basic premise of education.

When I was at university, I met a French girl who was from France who very obviously spoke French as her first language.  She took half a unit of “Beginners French” in her first year, and unsurprisingly got very good marks.  It was a complete waste of her time and of the university’s time, but she sailed through a half-unit in her first year and jumped through a hoop to get a bit closer to passing her first year.  This NVQ programme appears to be fourteen weeks of doing exactly that.  I would be doing modules in things that I was already doing and could do in my sleep.

The truth is that this is not a training scheme.  This is somebody giving you a certificate to tell you that you can do your job, which hopefully should be inferred by any other prospective employer looking at your previous years of service and a decent recommendation from your previous employer.  Instead of “upskilling the workforce”, a phrase that marks this out as a government scheme for it’s lack of sense, this is instead “pigeonholing the workforce”.   This isn’t helping anybody’s diversity or flexibility in the office.  If anything it’s restricting what they can and can’t do by putting it down in official looking writing that they are most suitable for Business Administration, tacitly implying for many people that they’re probably not much good for anything else.

Although the reams of fiddly paperwork were also off putting, as it was that sort of paperwork that seems designed to make you feel very stupid as you’re just not entirely sure what they want you to write down, I didn’t mind this so much.  The final nail in the coffin was the discovery that on completing the course, they give you fifty pounds, referred to in sinister tones by the initial assessor as “the incentive”.  In my limited life experience, the old adage “you get what you pay for” generally applies, and when you pay -£50 for a course, that’s probably the value you get out of it.  On the plus side, I can now without any feeling of guilt state “I wouldn’t do an NVQ in Business Administration if you paid me!” because I didn’t and I haven’t.

Just to really hit this point home, this scheme is fourteen weeks of paperwork and ongoing assessment that the government is bank rolling.  Not only that, even they obviously don’t feel like it’s worth anything, as they feel the need to encourage people to play along by handing out money with each certificate.  This just strikes me as a colossal waste of time and money.

In an attempt to at least try and throw a little balance in, it has been pointed out to me that some people might want a qualification to prove their worth on some level if they’ve missed out earlier on in the educational process.  This is fine, but it’s an awful shame that someone can be lead to feel that their lives are not fulfilled or that they are somehow inferior people without bits of paper with letters or a percentage grading on them.  There seems to be such an emphasis on the importance of gaining qualifications at the expense of people actually making something of themselves.  Society is full of people without a formal education that have risen to dizzying heights of success, and equally full of apparently highly educated who are as thick as two short planks and depressingly under achieving.