Viewpoint
Below are some of the articles written by Henry Stewart and other Happy staff.
Never put 'Degree Required' in a Job Advertisement
Why asking for generic degrees in job advertisements restricts your recruitment and discriminates against Afro-Caribbean, disabled and working-class people. Read.
Is government policy on small business a lot of hot air?
There is a lot of nonsense talked about the problems of red tape for small businesses. The real problem lies elsewhere, in the government attempts to centralise procurement and effectively cut small businesses out of many government contracts. Read.
Never put 'Degree Required' in a Job Advertisement
Whenever I see a job advertisement that says 'degree required' I wonder why. A degree does ensure a narrow academic capability but this is rarely a key requirement in any job outside of universities themselves.
Few degrees test teamwork, creativity, flexibility, inter-personal skills, attitude, or any of the most important things we look for in a job. Even in terms of intelligence, a degree represents only a very limited part of it. You could get a starred first at one of our best universities and yet find it impossible to work with others.
It is different if a specific degree is specified. Clearly to be an architect you need the years of study of an architecture degree, for economics research an economic degree would be an advantage and I wouldn't like to be seen by a doctor who had not studied medicine for several years.
However when a job advertisement simply states 'degree required' it indicates a specific skill is not required, but simply people who have had the experience of going to university and passing the exams there.
Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill
At Happy Computers we follow the simple principle: 'Hire for attitude, train for skill'. We do not ask applicants whether they have a degree, or indeed any qualification, until their second interview.
The result is that we have hired some hugely talented people who happen not to have succeeded in our education system. Our Managing Director, Cathy Callus, came from an immigrant background and left school at 16 to help support her family.
Her skills in creating the supportive and empowering work atmosphere of our company have to be seen to be believed. These have been recognised in many awards. In 2001 she won the Personnel Today HR Manager of the Year in 2001, with the judges commenting that her upward appraisals showed 'results to die for'. The previous year she had been rated one of the top four bosses in the UK in the DTI Boss of the Year awards.
Our Finance Manager, Natalie Day, joined us at 16 straight from school and has worked her way up. She may lack formal accounting qualifications but her ability to charm money out of late-paying clients and persuade even the Inland Revenue to accept delays in payment are second to none. And in a small company like ours those are the finance skills that matter most.
We have many other examples of key staff who would simply be ignored in companies that insist on degrees in recruitment. I often wonder why companies deliberately restrict their pool of talent. What is the point of a criteria that would eliminate candidates like Bill Gates and Richard Branson? The fact is that where there is no artificial barrier to those without degrees, as among entrepreneurs, those without degrees prove as successful as those with them.
How to Stop Discriminating
I think it is the desire to recruit 'one of us'. We want people who have been through similar experiences and development to ourselves. It used to be the case that city firms would recruit people who were in the Guards or had been to the right schools or belonged to the right club.
Now most companies have professional HR departments that would not allow such practices. However the insistence on degrees is just a wider example of the same practice and there is no doubt that it is profoundly discriminatory.
If you want to make sure your organisation has few Afro-Caribbeans, disabled or working-class staff, the surest way to make sure of this is to insist on degrees for most of your recruitment. All of these groups are massively under-represented in our universities.
If, however, you have a genuine commitment to employing from the full spectrum of society - whether from an equal opportunities perspective or simply from a desire to make your company more effective - then I defy you to explain how that fits with the discriminatory employment practice of requiring generic degrees of staff at any level in your organisation.
Is government policy on small business a lot of hot air?
We are told by government that small firms are flexible, competitive and innovative and the key to a growing economy. Publications are issued by OGC (the Office of Government Commerce) calling on departments to see the smaller supplier as potentially better value. How then can the same OGC issue procurements which exclude small business by their nature and, if successful, will take business from hundreds of small companies in one sector alone?
The OGC has undertaken a project to centralise procurement of government training through one organisation, Logica CMG. The programme is called SDS, Successful Delivery Skills. Logica CMG are currently selecting 'best of breed' training suppliers for 26 different areas of training.
The idea is that civil servants will be given a passbook (though probably a virtual one) and Logica CMG will stamp it after each course as a record of their personal development. There are indications that the Treasury may be prepared to provide additional funding for training provided it is through this scheme (as they will be confident of the quality of the product).
One of those 26 training areas is Desktop IT. Currently there are over 600 training providers in the UK, not to mention thousands of freelancers. It is a highly competitive and diverse market. Probably hundreds of these supply IT training to government. Logica CMG plan to select up to five of these to provide the service for the whole of government.
My company, Happy Computers, is in the top 50 companies IT training companies by sales. It has been in the top three by quality (as assessed by the institute of IT Training) in each of the last three years. We believe we are one of the top three providers, by sales volume, of desktop IT training to government in London. We have been told it is not even worth our while applying as we do not provide national coverage.
If this is the criteria, the 600 providers are immediately reduced to around 10 contenders. Fully 98% of providers, including all the small ones, are eliminated at the stroke of one central dictat.
This may be administratively convenient but who can it really benefit? Surely we have learnt that choice and competition lead to improved quality and lower prices. To reduce choice by 99% can only have a detrimental effect on provision, never mind the effect on the livelihoods of all those involved.
Imagine a government department in, say, Doncaster. Are they to be told to drop a cost effective local provider and instead travel to Leeds for this 'best of breed' provision. It will add cost and time and eliminate the supplier that probably understands very well their needs.
Even in London why should a department that is perfectly happy with its small supplier be expected to end their contract because somebody in OGC believes central planning is preferable to a market economy?
There may be programmes which need one supplier and standrad delivery. An example would be a department rolling out training across the country in a new internal IT system. But here we are talking about the widely diverse needs of different departments to learn basic IT like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Of course the programme may not succeed. Departments may refuse to take part, despite the incentives. (One department has already responded that the prices for project management training are twice what they are paying now for a high quality training service.) But should it have been undertaken at all?
There may be concerns about the quality of government supply and the need for gateways. In our industry there is an extremely effective quality gateway, provided by the accreditation system of the Institute of IT Training. If this is the concern then let the government dictate that people can receive their passbook stamp providing they use an Institute accredited company (which any training firm can become providing it meets the standards).
Or, if it is really in line with government policy to go for centralised procurement of services like this, then let it be honest. Let the OGC proclaim:
'We believe in big business, large enough to meet the needs of the whole of government. We may have talked about choice, dynamism and innovation in the past but what we really want is standardised products. We believe central control and administration is more important than diversity and competition.'
Or end this procurement and put in place mechanisms to prevent centralised procurements like this one, unless there is a clear and necessary need it addresses, taking place again.
