absolute significance. By this she means that credential inflation has fuelled
expectations amongst employers for higher levels of qualifications, while the emerging
demands of the knowledge economy has simultaneously forced employers to look for
broader evidence amongst new recruits of the capability to develop the skill of using
knowledge effectively in the workplace.
Another way of making sense of the concept of generic skill is to distinguish between
those conceptions which presuppose a focus on work activities of a fairly routine kind
compared with those work activities that are preoccupied with novel or unfamiliar
issues. This distinction presents vocational educators and workplaces with a set of
problems that the different contributors to the debate about generic skill rarely
acknowledge, since their primary focus is identifying changing conceptions of skill and
not skill development. Addressing the problem of how to prepare young people to
engage in routine and novel work activity involves two separate, but linked, issues.
The first problem is how to assist young people to develop context-free skills in
context-specific situations (Young 1999(b)). This is not easy since it is extremely
difficult to specify the nature and level of, for example ‘intellective’ and
‘polycontextual’ skills and, moreover, the learning potential of workplace varies
enormously (Guile and Young forthcoming). The second issue is how to design a
curriculum which provide young people with opportunities to relate the ‘codified’
knowledge they acquire through formal study to the ‘everyday’ knowledge they acquire
in workplaces, in order that they can develop new knowledge and skill (Guile and
Griffiths 1999). Re-thinking these challenges, however, is slowly forcing greater
attention to fall on the role of work experience in general and vocational education.
Partly because work experience provides an opportunity for young people to ‘connect’
different modes of learning to one another and, in the process, develop new knowledge
and new skill.
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