Carmel Marock

In South Africa a national peak structure, the Human Resource Development Council, led by the Deputy President and consisting of key Cabinet Ministers, senior leaders from organised labour and business, community representatives, professional bodies, and experts from research and higher education, was established to enable high-level coordination at a strategic level. There is little evidence of achievements of this Council and its associated human resource development strategy. This paper suggests that human resource development strategies in South Africa have been more about posturing to be seen to be doing something, than actually planning the development of the skills of the nation, with one brief period when there was a focus on ‘plumbing’—or dealing with specifically targeted ‘blockages’ in the skills ‘pipeline’. The underlying problem, we suggest, lies in the very notion of national human resource development, which seems on the one hand to be too broad and unwieldy a concept to be useful to governments; on the other hand, it seems to carry too much of the weight of economic development. These conceptual weaknesses, as well as bureaucratic weaknesses in South Africa, explain the poorly conceptualized structures and processes.

This paper explores how systems of occupational standards are designed in some wealthy English-speaking countries, and how they link to systems of predicting skills requirements and systems for classifying occupations, as well as what they are intended to achieve. It provides some analysis of how they work in practice, how occupational skills are certified, and what the impacts of these systems are on labour markets. The focus is mainly on systems for mid-level occupations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. All of these countries have national systems of occupational classification, and these are briefly described. None of them has a single national system for the development, updating, and regulation of occupational standards, nor for certification. There are variations across different occupations as well as across states, territories, and devolved administrations. Legal frameworks differ across occupational areas, as do certification systems, the role of employers, and so on. There is considerable variation between high and mid-level occupations. These countries all also have a variety of different mechanisms for attempting to gain insight into future labour market requirements. There are many manuals and guidelines in the English-speaking world which describe what occupational standards should look like, the kinds of structures that should be set up to develop them, and what the processes should look like; these are often derived from practices in the countries listed above. The standards developed are usually intended to be used as the basis of teaching, assessment, and certification, and usually do not link with labour market regulation or license to practice requirements; governments in English-speaking countries have largely favoured unregulated labour markets, with exceptions in a few occupational areas, and with the obvious exception of immigration requirements. The lack of labour market regulation of occupational standards is, according to many researchers, a contributing factor to the low success of systems for occupational standards in English-speaking countries. Despite these problems, models from the English-speaking countries are commonly replicated in other parts of the world, and have influenced the reform of occupational standards systems as well as of technical and vocational education in many countries in the developing world.