This research will examine the ways in which adopting human resource management and high performance work systems can help organisations to better utilise and retain skills. This research relates to, industry-by-industry approach to skills planning, and focuses on a single issue (the adoption of human resource management and high performance work systems) across several industries. The aim of the project is to produce guidelines for organisations to adopt improved management practices in order to better utilise and retain skills and reap maximum returns for their investments in training. The research will use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods including a survey, expert interviews and case studies. The qualitative phases of the research will focus on four major industry areas - manufacturing, community services and health, retail and financial services.
This research proposal focuses, on skills developed and accredited through the national VET system and skills developed within organisations outside the qualifications system. This is because managers focus on the overall workforce and how best to use its skills and experience to achieve the objectives of the organisation, rather than only on one group in isolation (such as VET trained staff, university graduates or enterprise trained staff alone). There are four research questions of particular interest:
1. What industries (and organisations within) have the most success in utilising skills and retaining staff?
2. Does the adoption of sophisticated management techniques, such as human resource management and high performance work systems, help industries and enterprises to recruit and develop, and particularly to utilise and retain skilled staff; and, if so, through what mechanisms does this improvement occur and how can any improvements be measured?
3. Are there general lessons that all industries and organisations can share in the better utilisation and retention of skills?
4. What specific measures assist in retraining and retaining existing workers?
This research will use a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology (Jean-Lee, 1994). The advantage of a mixed methodological approach is that it enables measurement of the extent of the use of high performance work systems and human resource management in forms and their relationship to the development, utilisation and retention of skills (questions of extent and association) as well as investigation of how the use of various management practices enable organisations to plan skills better (questions of causality). This will enable the research team to produce material that will be of significant benefit to organisations.
The qualitative phases (expert interviews and case studies) of the research will focus on four industry areas and be conducted largely at the organisation level. The sectors were chosen with regard to:
* the extent to which industries are exposed to global competition
* the balance of the workforce in the industry (gender, full and part-time etc)
* public sector compared to private sector enterprises
* existence of small and large organisations
* the extent to which industries have been affected by technological change.
The four industry areas proposed, Manufacturing, Community Services and Health, Retail and Financial Services, give a good mix of these factors.
The project will proceed in five phases.
Phase 1. Scoping of the project. A short review of recent research in skills use/retention and the relationship of skills to human resource management and high performance work systems will be produced as a platform for the development of the survey and case studies. A reference group will be established.
Phase 2. Individual interviews. A number of individual interviews will be held with key informants. Informants will include:
* Representatives of appropriate industry skills councils from the selected industry sectors
* Representatives of appropriate employer bodies
* CEOs of selected organisations in the relevant industry sectors
The interviews will be conducted face to face where possible or, if not possible, by phone. Information from the interviews will be used to develop the survey questionnaire.
Phase 3. Survey. A mailed survey will be sent in two waves to about 3,000 organisations economy-wide with details drawn from the Dun and Bradstreet database. The survey will not be confined to the four specific industries chosen for the qualitative phase for two reasons: to increase the number of respondents and to provide an economy-wide basis for comparison with the four industries chosen for more intensive investigation.
The analysis of the survey will employ techniques from structural equation modelling (SEM) to estimate the strength of paths and direction of relationships between the use of human resource management, high performance work systems and other management practices with measures of skills utilisation and retention.
Phase 4. Case studies. Eight case studies will be undertaken in the four industry sectors (2 case studies in each). The case studies will enable the team to investigate the ways in which human resource management and high performance work systems practices work at the organisation level to improve skill development, utilisation and retention.
Phase 5. Integration. The final analysis will draw together the data from the expert interviews, the survey and the case studies into a short final report in the normal 1 3 25 NCVER format.
Charles Sturt University is well known as an institution that has supported a vigorous VET research capability over many years. Staff from the School of Education and Commerce frequently work together to investigate issues at the interface between management and vocational education and training. CSU has won a number of NCVER and other grants over the last 10 years to carry out leading edge research in VET. Research activities at the university are supported by the full-range of research infrastructure and rigorous financial and other services.
