This chapter returns to a fuller consideration of one of the two major strands cited in the push towards a learning society (see Chapter One). This is the view that lifelong learning is increasingly necessary for work-related reasons, what we term here the ‘economic imperative’. Despite rhetorical acknowledgement of the relevance of lifelong learning to issues of social inclusion, it remains the case that recent government policies in this area are rooted in this ‘economic imperative’ (Gorard, 2000a). This is a view based on human capital theory (or, more correctly, a rather crude version of it) that investment in education and training leads to a ‘return’ both for the individual and for society. It is tied up with somewhat confused notions of contingent labour, trainability, careership, and the value of human resources in a global economy. Such notions have been expressed in a variety of policy and discussion documents. The view is so pervasive it has even been cited in some NIACE publications, such as the Learning country, where it is stated that “lifelong learning is a means to improve economic performance”.

Contingent labour

One of the main arguments underlying the need for lifelong learning, and multi-skilling, is that ‘jobs for life’ have gone. In this account, workers who previously worked in single occupations for their working lives, now face the prospect of several job changes. It is possible to use our individual work and training histories to assess the scale of this trend towards ‘contingent labour’. If we ignore the current spell for each individual, whose length we clearly cannot measure yet, there is actually an increase over 50 years in the average length of work episodes, and therefore a trend away from contingent labour.

For a more detailed analysis, we define contingent working as a period of self-employment, or full- or part-time employment lasting less than one year before a change of state. Our 1,104 respondents reported 3,249 distinct economic episodes, distinguished solely by a change of state (for example, from government training to full-time employed, or from one type of job to another). Of these episodes 348 (or nearly 11%) were contingent in nature. These were predictably less common in full-time jobs, and more common in part-time and temporary jobs.