Skill and work experience in the European knowledge economy

that they have taken (Oesterman (1994). Firms fail to recognise that they have to
fundamentally re-think the relationship between business strategy, organisational
design, human resource management and human resource development if they are to
successfully compete on the basis of knowledge and capability (Guile and Fonda
1998).

Policymakers have rarely addressed the complexity of the issues surrounding the
debate about the knowledge economy and knowledge work in the EU. In fact, the
concept of the knowledge economy has primarily been treated as a new reality or
context that people must adjust to. This assumption has resulted in a widespread
demand from policymakers throughout Europe for national education and training
systems to support young people to develop the forms of generic skill, which they have
commonly assumed are an essential requirement for working in a knowledge economy.
This is a highly laudable goal: it introduces a future-oriented perspective to EU
education and training policies. Unfortunately, policymakers have failed to appreciate a
number of issues, the first of which being that the concept of generic skill is a much
more complex issue than has been recognised. The second issue is that the type of
knowledge required in a knowledge economy, as the preceeding debate has indicated,
is much more multi-faceted than the concept of knowledge associated with many
definitions of generic skill. The third issue is that developing generic skill in academic
and vocational curricula poses problems that have, so far, not been explicitly
addressed. These issues are explored in the next sections of the paper.

The concept of generic skill and the knowledge economy.

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