Building Back Better: the UK Government replaces it’s industrial strategy

On the 3rd March, the UK Government published a policy paper titled Build Back Better: our plan for growth alongside the new budget. This plan replaces the previous 2017 Industrial Strategy with a focus on post-pandemic recovery. The Government aims to use the investment to support a move away from an economy geographically weighted towards London and the South East of England and encourage growth across the UK.

These remarkable vaccines are giving us a realistic way forwards to restart our businesses and our lives. As we do so, we must grasp the historic opportunity before us: to learn the lessons of this awful pandemic and build back better, levelling up across our United Kingdom and fixing the problems that have held back too many people for too long.

Boris Johnson – Prime Minister

The plan covers six core areas for growth:

  1. Infrastructure
  2. SKills
  3. Innovation
  4. Levelling up the whole of the UK
  5. Support the transition to Net Zero
  6. Support our vision for Global Britain

The skills plan includes the Lifetime Skills Guarantee to narrow the skills gap in technical and adult basic skills, including digital fluency, and a continued rollout of apprenticeships. The OECD has suggested that the UK could improve productivity by 5% by reducing its skills mismatch to levels similar to other high performing economies.

There has been a recognition of the technical skills shortages, with only 4% of young people choosing a technical qualification after leaving school compared to 33% selecting to study a degree. Basic skills are a problem for many adults, with over a quarter of workers having low literacy or numeracy skills. The Government aims to invest heavily in the Further Education sector and make technical education a genuine alternative to University.

The best way to improve people’s life chances is to give them the skills to succeed. The UK has a strong foundation of advanced skills, but lags behind international comparators on technical and basic adult skills. The Government is transforming Further Education, encouraging lifelong learning through the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, and building an apprenticeships revolution.

Rishi Sunak – Chancellor of the Exchequer

Apprenticeships play a large part in the skills plan. There is a commitment to expand traineeships and improve the progression rate to apprenticeships, incentives for new apprenticeship hires, steps to improve the quality of provision, and improvements to employers’ apprenticeship system.

Technical education is being expanded by increasing the number of T-levels as an alternative to A-levels and higher technical qualifications as an alternative to university degrees. Institutes of Technology will be rolled out in every region of the country to expand the twelve existing pilot institutions. 

For those already in work, funding is provided to study level 3 qualifications for those that do not yet have one. Skills Bootcamps have been launched to provide flexible and bite-sized introductions to employer-led skills. The Lifelong Loan entitlement is mentioned, but it will not be available until 2025. The loan promises students the ability to study qualifications by module and flexibly received funding to mirror their study choices.  

The policy paper has nothing new around the skills strategy, but it represents recommitments alongside the new budget. The Government’s focus is clearly on matching education and training provision to the economy’s skills needs. Many people will be disappointed that the Industrial Strategy will not be updated, and the university sector is still waiting for details on the Lifelong loan details. It is now the Government’s chance to deliver on the commitments.

How many hours do you actually work?

The typical working day in most of the west is 8 hours or 40 hours per week. Working 8 hours per day can be traced back to sixteenth century Spain where the day was split into two four hour blocks with a break in the middle for when the day was at its hottest. The UK currently has a 48-hour working week limit, with a voluntary opt-out, set out in the Working Time Regulations of 1998 and later the EC Working Time Directive of 2003. But is the factory model of hours the most effective for knowledge workers?

“Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”

Robert Owen

In academia in the UK, contracted hours are more like 7.4 or 37 hours per week. Studies suggest that 7.6 hours per day or 38 hours per week is the optimum working hours for a knowledge worker and that productivity falls sharply over 50 hours per week. Taking a full day off each week and six weeks of holiday per year also positively impacts your productivity. 

A study of UK office workers found that people were only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes each day on average. Workers spend the rest of the day on distractions, including checking social media (44 minutes), reading news websites (65 minutes), and discussing out of work activities with colleagues (40 minutes). Over half of those surveyed said that these distractions made the working day more bearable and aided in their productivity.  

Track your work for a week or two and find out how many hours your ‘at work’ and how many of those are on the things you think are essential. Once you have that information, decide how you want to spend your time; if you are only doing three hours per day of productive work, can you increase that to four and spend the rest of the day being more deliberate with your time? What could you do with those 44 minutes if you delete Instagram from your phone?

How to maximise your productivity at work

  • Average around 38 hours of work per week
  • Do not work over 50 hours a week regularly
  • Take at least one day per week entirely off
  • Take six weeks of holiday per year
  • Spend a week or two logging your work to identify the wasted time and eliminate that to free up your time for whatever you want to do with it. 

The financial return on investment of a degree

The average student from a low-income background will borrow £53,000 to attend a three-year degree at university, which rises to £28240.75 with interest if left unpaid over 30 years. The first £27,750 covers tuition fees, with the rest used for maintenance costs, including rent, food, and socialising, with four-fifths of students living away from home to study.

The graduate or professional premium is a term used to describe the increase in average wages that university graduates can expect having achieved a degree.

futurefinance.com

Students are told that going to university is an investment. The UK Government has claimed a graduate premium of an additional £400,000 of income over a lifetime. 1999 Age-earnings reported The Economic Journal showed the premium at an average of £410,000, the premium has reduced to just £100,000.

Over a 45 year working life, £100,000 is just £2,222 per year before income tax and national insurance. This increase in earnings does not cover the interest accruing on the loan. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, 20% of students would have been earning more ten years after graduating if they had skipped university and gone straight into work instead. 

It is important to note that the graduate premium is an average, and the return differs significantly by gender and subject area. According to the Institute of Economic Affairs, male Medical and Dentistry graduates earn an average of £400,000 more over their working lives than non-graduates. Male Creative Arts and Design graduates earn £10,000 less than non-graduates over their working lives.   

There are many reasons to go to university. Still, the financial return on your investment of delaying starting your career by three years and the £28k-£53k dept is only financially beneficial if you choose your degree specifically for that reason. 

Grease The Groove

I am currently following the Rite of Passage programme from Pavel Tsatsouline, working towards pressing a 40kg kettlebell overhead with one arm. As part of the programme, Pavel suggests that you can do ‘Grease The Groove’ (GTG) single-leg squats to supplement the main workouts.

‘Grease The Groove’ describes performing regular reps of a movement throughout the day to build the skill of strength while avoiding fatigue. Pavel suggests in ‘People to the people!’ that strength is a skill; to get stronger, you must practice strength consistently. He states that the strongest people in the world only go to max effort infrequently and for a reason such as competition. The rest of the time, strong athletes push their limits with weight and tension, rather than going to exhaustion with excessive reps sticking to 5 reps or less and always able to do at least one more each set.

There are two main ways to get strong:

  1. Train heavy: If 100% intensity is the maximum you can lift, focus on reps at 85-95% of this.
  2. Train often: around 50% of your max weight/reps, and training as often as possible while staying fresh.

The ‘train often’ strategy is based on stimulating a neural pathway, described by the Hebbian rule. The more you repeatedly stimulate the pathway by repeating a strength movement, the stronger and more efficient that movement becomes. You will develop the ability to lift more with the same effort in that specific movement. For example, if you can do ten pull-ups with good form, you would perform sets of five pull-ups (50% of your max) throughout each day. After a few weeks, you would retest your max number, and you will now be able to do more than ten. GTG is specific to the skill, and so focusing on form is essential, and the volume of reps will reinforce the technique you use. 

If you are training to failure, you are training to fail.

Dr Terry Todd,

You should make the five sets part of your day, spacing them out with a minimum of 15 minutes rest in between. A common technique is setting a timer at the top of each hour during work hours. You could do a set each time you sit down or stand up from the desk. Another alternative is to do a set when you pass a place in your house or even each time you open the fridge. 

Grease the groove

  1. Pick an exercise in which you want to become stronger, and you can do between 5 and six reps.
  2. Perform the exercise several times a day with two to three reps with at least 15 minutes break between each set.
  3. Blast the groove with the final rep of the last set.
  4. If you feel it the next day, take a day off and reduce the number of sets or reps the following day.

For my Single leg squat, I can only do one rep on each leg currently, so I need to find a regression that I can perform five to six reps with to use for my daily sets. I will use cossack squats for the next two-four weeks and then retest the number of single-leg squats I can do after all the practice.

How would you go about becoming an expert at designing online learning?

I read a tweet this morning that asked; if you could be in the 1% of experts for any skill, what would that be? I have been building my skills in the design of online learning for several years, so it got me thinking about what expertise looks like in my field. I wrote the following question at the top of a page and started to make a list. 

How would you go about becoming an expert at designing online learning? 

Here are my steps to developing expertise in the design of online and blended learning courses. If you have questions or what to add to the list, message me on Twitter.

  1. Follow a documented set of learning and design principles
  2. Develop a model for estimating effort and costs
  3. Follow a repeatable development process
  4. Know the fundamentals of project management and follow them religiously
  5. Treat the course creator like the hero of the story, support them and collaborate.
  6. Have a Quality Assurance process linked to the design principles
  7. Set clear expectations for students, create metrics to monitor against these, and have interventions in place when they are not met.
  8. Collect and analyse lots of data and user feedback
  9. Iterate, iterate, iterate
  10. Frequently update your learning and design principles, costing model, and development process

Notes: Firstly, I have explicitly focused on the design of courses and separated this from the very different development and delivery skills. Secondly, I have taken some liberties by putting all the learning and design principles into a single step. These two areas are vast and cover everything from accessibility and user experience to psychology and learning and teaching models. Thirdly, within the third step of following the development process, I currently prefer to use the rapid prototyping model that follows the Design thinking steps, including the creation of student personas, and UCL’s ABC workshop for mapping out the course. Finally, this is the first attempt at a list, and I might wake up tomorrow and realise I have missed a whole section of the field and need to update this list. If you are in the area already or are interested in developing your expertise, then I hope this list is useful.

If you have questions or want to add to the list, message me on Twitter. I would love to see other peoples lists for building expertise in the design of online courses too.

Technological change: Culture always pays the price for technology

Neil Postman gave a talk in Denver, 1998 titled Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. 

Postman’s speech suggests that technology cannot solve the human race’s most profound problems and creates new ones. He provides five ideas to help understand these new problems.  

Here is a summary of the five ideas using cuts of Postman’s words:

  1. All Technological change is a trade-off. Culture always pays the price for technology.
  2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evening among the population. There are always winners and losers in technological change.
  3. Embedded in every technology, there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. The ideas are often hidden from our view because they are somewhat abstract in nature. “The medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan.
  4. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible.
  5. Media tend to become mythic. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.

The full text of the speech is freely available on the internet. It is worth the read.

We must view and acknowledge the change to culture brought about by technology and start to use these tools to improve our lives rather than changing ourselves to fit the technology. Many of us now provide our undivided attention to our phones whenever notifications request it, or open social media’s endless scrolling feed and never allow our brains to be bored or fully assimilate new information between tasks. 

We have just been forced through a cultural shift that has required significant technological change. We are beginning to emerge to a new work culture that we can either deliberately design to meet our needs, then build technology to enable it, or allow the current technology to shape this culture for us.

Maybe take a few minutes over the weekend with some paper and a pen, turn off the phone, and sit in a quiet space and start to design.

The Overton Window

You often hear on the news that an event or series of events has shifted the Overton window. This was spoken about regularly around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership to explain why his socialist policies were now acceptable and popular with a majority of the public. Policies that fall outside of the window will cause dissatisfaction and lose public approval, so politicians must identify the current window position and keep proposals within this window of acceptability. Activists will attempt to move the window or expand it by persuading the public of a given political idea’s merits or even shutting down beliefs seen as acceptable to shift the widow towards their views.

The Overton Window, or the discourse window, is a term used in political science to explain the range of policies that are seen as acceptable by the public at any given time. If a policy falls outside the Overton window, it’s seen as too extreme for the voting public to accept. The Overton window moves, so a policy idea in one election year might be seen as radical, might then be seen as popular just four years later for the next election.

Joseph Overton created the model to describe the level of government intervention the voters would be prepared to accept on a spectrum with freer on one end and less free on the other. The window can move up and down the range with the public mood. Joshua Trevino later added six degrees of acceptance to the model: from unthinkable, radical, acceptable sensible, popular, and finally policy.

The six degrees work both ways along the spectrum, meaning that there are currently unthinkable policies on both ends of the freedom spectrum and softer versions of these that might be seen as sensible or even popular. The current lockdown in the UK is an excellent example of a dramatic shift of the Overton window; eighteen months ago, it would have been unthinkable for a democratic government to restrict the public from leaving their homes for months at a time. However, we are over two months into the second set of tight restrictions on movement, and according to YouGov, Government disapproval is only at 43%, and approval is 36%. The Prime Minister’s approval rating is at 41%, roughly the same as in January 2020 before the pandemic began.

Many activists with political views currently in the unthinkable areas of the spectrum will attempt to restrict freedom of speech at the other end of the spectrum. These activities use techniques, such as no-platforming. They try to stop venues from allowing a speaker from holding an event, pressuring organisations to enact policies that prevent free expression, or repeatedly questioning a speaker’s reputation.

Throughout history, efforts to move the Overton window towards more freedom have had positive effects, such as abolishing the transatlantic slave trade and universal voting rights. The discourse window can also move towards less freedom, such as the rise of communist and fascist dictatorial regimes.

When you see people trying to move, the spectrum of acceptable opinion tries to assess if they are doing it to reposition the Overton window towards a current radical or unthinkable policy and decide if this is a move towards more or less freedom. Just remember that someone has to be in charge of what is seen as ‘acceptable’ when speech is restricted; you might agree with the current person’s views, but what if the next person in charge is someone that does not agree with you?

Objectivity vs Subjectivity: Honesty is the best policy

Objectivity is a theory and is not achievable in reality. There is too much information on any given event to include everything; the writer must make a choice. Every story told comes from a perspective, from the facts that the teller chooses to include or not include and the framing of the language. Everything you read is subjective purely because a person writes it.

Objective. (of a person or their judgement) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Oxford Languages

Subjective. based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Oxford Languages

I believe there are two principles to good journalism:

  1. It is honest about its perspective 
  2. It is fair to the other sides of the argument

Honest. free of deceit; truthful and sincere.

Oxford languages

Fair. treating people equally without favouritism or discrimination.

Oxford Languages

Instead of aiming for objectivity in your writing, be honest about your opinions and beliefs that have led you to frame the piece in the way you have and try to empathise with the views of others that see it differently. The world will be a better place if we all have a little more integrity and compassion. 

Linkedin Learning’s Workplace Learning Report 2021

Linkedin released their 5th annual Workplace Learning Report today. The findings are collected from Linkedin’s learning and development survey, completed by over 5,000 professionals across 27 countries.

65% of L&D pros have a seat at the exec table, up from 24% last year. This increase is mostly due to the need’s for remote working during the pandemic. 57% of L&D professionals say learning & development as moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘need to have’.

The focus of Learning and Development in companies in 2021 is upskilling and reskilling, with 59% of companies saying this is their priority. The need for new skills can be partly attributed to the digitalisation of many roles. According to the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs will be displaced, and 97 million new jobs will be created globally by 2025 due to computing playing a larger part in many businesses. The pandemic has accelerated many companies plans for digitisation and the training staff to take advantage of the new technologies. Leadership and management (53%), Virtual onboarding (33%), and Diversity and inclusion (33%) are the other most common priorities. The two most essential skills are resilience and digital fluency to address the pace of change. 

The skills gap created by increase technology in the workplace has lead companies to focus more on internal mobility, giving employees extra motivation to engage in learning and development. 51% of UK companies now say that internal mobility is more important now that pre-pandemic. To support internal employee progression, 39% of L%D professionals are currently identifying skills gaps in their organisation, and 33% are developing tools to help develop programmes targeted at upward or adjacent moves of employees within the company. The report suggests that employees at companies with high internal mobility stay almost twice as long; an average of 2.9 years for low internal mobility companies and 5. years where internal mobility is high. 

Community is becoming a crucial part of learning programmes. At Linkedin learning’s internal programmes, learners who used the platform’s social features watched an average of 30 times more content. This mirrored in the feelings of Learning and Development professionals in the survey. 84% said that learning is more engaging when done with other people, 94% said that it is more successful, and 95% said it helps create a sense of belonging. 

Linkedin Learnings own programmes have seen a 58% increase in users in the last year to 25 million global users; each user is watching on average twice the number of hours. Generation Z, born between 1995-2010, are the top uses of Linkedin Learning, growing 2.5 times the number of users in this bracket, and they are watching 50% more hours.

The five most popular Linkedin Learning courses for learning and development professionals:

  1. Instructional Design Essentials: Models of ID by Joe Pulichino
  2. Articulate Storyline Essential Training by Daniel Brigham
  3. Instructional Design: Storyboarding by Daniel Brigham
  4. Converting Face-to-Face Training into Digital Learning by Daniel Brigham
  5. Measuring Learning Effectiveness by Jeff Toister

You should write a book

If you have original ideas that have value or are an expert in a field, you should write a book no matter how niche. There will be at least one person out of the almost eight billion people in the world that needs your ideas or could benefit from your advice to develop the skills that you have earned. If you are not yet an expert or feel you have something to share, but you don’t feel you are ready, the act of writing a book might be the thing you need. Start by writing a book proposal and commit to the process of two to four hours a day for the next two years, working on your ideas, skills, and expertise. 

Why write a book?

Seth Gobin, in a February 2007 blog post, suggests that everyone should write a book. He describes how he wrote his ebook ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus‘ to give away free to spread the idea (about how free ideas spread faster than expensive ones). The book was downloaded over two million times, and a Google search for the term brought up over two hundred thousand results at the time of his post. Godin writes that on top of the opportunity to share your ideas across the globe, writing helps to organise and clarify the ideas making them better. 

Smart people with good ideas worth sharing can get a lot out of this exercise.

Seth Godin

Andress Erikson, in his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, wrote that experts form better mental representations about their specialist subject through deliberate practice. Mental representations “in essence… are preexisting patterns of information – facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on – that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations.” The deliberate practice of writing a book will allow you to solidify your understanding of your specialist area and build mental representations.

In Daniel Priestley’s book ‘Key Person of Influence‘, he writes that being an author in your area of expertise provides validation and trust in your skills and allows people an opportunity to learn more and share your ideas. Having a published book is also a great way to attract like-minded people.

Very few people create a significant volume of published content. If you have articles, blogs, reports, case studies and a book, you are much more likely to be perceived as a Key Person of Influence in your industry.

Daniel Priestley

Writing and publishing a book can cost nothing, and there are no barriers beyond effort and time. Your book can be launched using your website and social media platform and via amazon self-publishing. You can treat your book as a channel of your portfolio business, as the output of deliberate practice while developing expertise, or as an opportunity to share your ideas with people who will find value in them. Now I have convinced you that you need to write a book, we need to look at what to write. 

What to write

Non-fiction books are traditionally between 50000 to 80,000 words; it takes around 500 words to fill an A4 page, so that is just 100-150 pages. To fill those 100 pages, you need to start with two things;

  1. A big idea
  2. A target audience

Your book needs to solve a problem and should be written as a transition from confusion to clarity. Start with the audience and how you can help them. The total addressable market, the number of people who make up your target audience, should be quite targeted if you intend to self-publish, and you will need to address a specific problem. If you are unsure, think of a younger version of yourself or a beginner in your field. Next, think about the one big idea that you would like to share with them to solve a problem they will experience, and you could help them solve it. 

A great example of a big idea and a specific target audience is Cal Newport and his big idea around deep work. Cal has written five books since becoming an academic; So Good, They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, The Time-Block Planner, and A World Without Email. Cal’s big idea is that to create the life you want; you need to develop your ‘…ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks.’ Cal’s target audience is millennial knowledge workers that are easily distracted by social media.  

Geoffrey Moore’s Value proposition framework from his book Crossing the Chasm will let you know if you are ready to start writing or if you need to explore your ideas further.

Moore’s Value Proposition Framework

For (target reader)Who (statement of need or opportunity)

The  (working book title) is a book

That  (key benefit, reason to buy)

Unlike  (primary competitive alternative)

My book  (statement of primary differentiation)

You should treat writing your book as a software app or new business idea and use your value proposition as a business plan idea. Talk to people, specifically your target read and test out the ‘statement of need or opportunity to see if it accurately represents a problem you could fix and check that the ‘key benefit’ will be a solution. Finally, have a look at similar books on the market and make sure that you have something unique to say. Tech start-ups are advised to get feedback from at least fifty people before committing to a business model, so use this as a guide and be systematic in collecting feedback on your big idea to help write your book proposal.

Start with a book proposal

Traditionally, a book proposal is a document written for publishes to convince them to publish your book. The publishing industry is at least as old as the Gutenberg printing press (1440), and the process of writing has been developed over the last six hundred years, so it is worth paying attention to. Even if you intend to self-publish, the book proposal is an ideal place to start to help you structure your ideas. 

The book proposal summarises the book’s big idea, lays out the chapters with a summary for each, and proposes a marketing plan to create awareness of the book with your target audience. You will want to use your value proposition and the notes from your interviews to brainstorm critical questions, concepts, and facts that you want to use and start to arrange this into a structured narrative.  

MasterClass suggested a book proposal should include:

  1. Title page
  2. Overview
  3. Author bio
  4. Chapter outline and table of contents
  5. Sample chapter
  6. Competitive titles analysis
  7. Target audience
  8. Marketing plan
  9. Additional information

Now Do the Work.