It was on again, even at Finance Minister Edward Scicluna’s recent excellent presentation about the pre-budget document. I refer to the ongoing mantra by employers, and now it seems even by some trade unions, all complaining about our educational system producing people with only certificates (“pieces of paper” one savant called them) but no employment skills.

Frankly, the allegation is now bordering on the ridiculous. It exhibits a glaring ignorance about the fact that educational institutions, everywhere, exist primarily with a specific and definite purpose: that of getting a certain quantum of ‘knowledge’ into peoples’ minds. That that effort’s success or otherwise is, at the end of the programme, evidenced by ‘papers’ is neither here or there.

But the truth of the distinction between knowledge and skills continues to remain, and evidently unrealised, by all our mantra players.

And so I ask employers and trade unions: what in reality are you doing to ensure that people who will have emerged from the education sector come to be equipped with the skills you so specifically say you are wanting? For starters, have you defined and stated which are these blessed skills you say you are wanting and which you allege are not available? Because if it is negotiating, interviewing, specialist report writing, public speaking, deep technical analysis, specific problem-solving, complicated public relations, office politics handling, and other similar stuff that is always and inevitably couched only in the specific ethos and requirements of your individual firms, then this is something which you have the responsibility of providing and not the nation’s educational institutions.

How much money is being spent by our companies or employers themselves on having their own in-house training centres?

Malta Enterprise, MFSA, the public service, parastatal agencies and others are, so far, not allowed by much of the country’s legislation to impose that every employer taking on new workers has to spend x, or y, or z, on ‘skilling’ workers to their own image, likeness, and specific work requirements.

Nostalgically it may be said that this is indeed a far cry from when in Malta foresighted employers like the Malta Dockyard, Barclays Bank, Cable & Wireless, and others, had their own in-house staff training centres and lecturers for imparting the specific skills that they needed their own qualified staff to have.

It is interesting for example that the public service does not feature as a complainer similar to local employers and trade unions, and this is, possibly, because it has had for many years a well-run Staff Development Organisation (SDO).

There is a very simple and obvious question which needs to be asked. How much money is being spent by our companies or employers themselves on having their own in-house training centres, lecturers, CPD or CPE programmes, on financing employees’ post-grad development, and actually bringing them up to the level of skill ownership which they need? Or are they just happy with a situation where they can freely rant against the government or our educational institutions and, while doing so, often importing (some dubiously skilled) foreigners to satisfy their own personalised specific needs?

Job skills are highly particular to each employer, each sector, and to each specific job in every place of work. It most often is the case that such skills, and such skills training, cannot be imparted or given if the would-be recipient does not in fact actually already have the prior knowledge base that can only be imparted in what are often insulted as the paper factories.

So what this reality in fact means is that every employer must come to also accept that he is a bad employer if he doesn’t himself structure proper skill development for all his employees.

In some ways it is consoling to see some local organisations who have long seen and felt this grave responsibility of skilling their workers. I am happy when I see the work which, for example, organisations like the local PriceWaterhouseAcademy, BOV and others, carry out.

Rather than criticise our educational institutions, they are rolling up their sleeves and getting on with the job of adequately – no, superbly - skilling their workers. In the process, notice that they never feature among the eternal moaners about the ‘lack of available skills’.

And, finally, would we in fact have some of the presently successful sectors of our economy were it not a fact that our ‘paper factories’ have over so many long years produced practically all those who work in them?

John Consiglio is a retired banker  and lectures economics at the  University of Malta.