Skill and work experience in the European knowledge economy

Educational policy, work experience and employability.

The transition from education and training to working life.

In response to the challenges presented by economic and technological restructuring,
EU Member States, in common with other countries, have undertaken a considerable
number of initiatives to support the transition of young people from school-to-work
and enhance their future employability (Stern and Wagner 1999). Two of the most
common measures have been to encourage schools and colleges to increase the
opportunities for post-16 students to undertake work-experience and to fund new
educational programmes for unemployed or disaffected young people that include a
work experience component (Griffiths et al forthcoming). Despite these initiatives, the
transition of many young people into employment is still highly problematic.

One explanation for this problem is that since employers are increasingly faced with a
surfeit of qualified applicants, they actively look for generic skills that are not solely
accounted for by formal credentials (Chisholm 1997). Most EU countries have
assumed that one of the most effective ways of helping young people to develop
generic skills was to increase their access to work experience (Griffiths et al
forthcoming). Unfortunately many models of work experience in general and
vocational education have addressed new issues about skill development by relying on
old models of learning in the workplace (Guile and Griffiths 2001). Most models of
work experience are geared to quite traditional conceptions of work and work roles,
based on fairly mechanistic conceptions about the process of learning and, as such, fail
to support students to develop more ‘future-orientated’ capabilities, for example,
seeing the limitations of existing forms of work practice and working with others to
conceive of alternatives. Despite the best intentions of policymakers, therefore, work
experience has often ended-up affirming the idea that its main purpose is to assist
young people to learn how to re-produce pre-existing activities. Consequently, very

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