| | By Mick James
The nation recently
mourned the death of the
last World War I
veteran, and rightly saw
it as a milestone;
finally, there was
no-one who could tell
you, from first-hand
experience, what it was
like in the trenches.
It’s not often we
realise that an entire
class of people vanishes
from sight, and perhaps
we should pay more
attention to it.
Recently, someone I
was interviewing
casually mentioned that
the chairman of their
company had started work
with the organisation as
an apprentice fitter.
You hardly ever hear
stories like that
anymore. Will we have a
ceremony when the last
one retires? And how
long will we have to
wait until the next one
comes along?
These thoughts were
brought into sharper
focus by the recent
final report from The
Panel on Fair Access to
the Professions,
Unleashing Aspiration.
This group, under the
chairmanship of the MP
Alan Milburn, has been
compiling evidence on
the ease of access to
the professions that are
such a vital part of the
UK economy, and I have
to say it makes
depressing reading.
The report begins
with a survey of the
UK’s post-war social
mobility, of which
Milburn’s own story is
such a prominent
example. His journey
took him from a council
estate to the Cabinet,
but he is just one of
thousands who were able
to follow a similar path
as increased access to
education coincided with
a massive expansion in
the professional sector.
But now this mobility
has all but flattened
out: the professions are
becoming more, and not
less exclusive. Over
half of the UK’s current
professionals – up to
three-quarters in some
professions – went to
independent schools,
compared to just 7% of
the population as a
whole. Today’s younger
professionals come from | |
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| | families with higher
incomes than their
forebears, and
tomorrow’s will come
from higher earning
households still.
There are a number of
factors driving this –
the professions have
inexorably moved to
all-graduate recruitment
policies, and
professional jobs tend
to be concentrated in
the South East. But
there are more insidious
factors, such as the
availability of
internships to young
jobseekers which may
only be available to
members of the right
networks. As the report
puts it, internships
“operate as part of an
informal economy in
which securing an
internship depends not
on what you know but who
you know” –and also on
one’s ability to fund
working for nothing. And
gender, ethnicity,
disability and age still
appear to present
significant barriers to
entry and advancement in
the professional
workforce.
Does all this matter?
Clearly, as the title of
the panel says, it is
unfair to the bright
young children from low
and middle income
families who are denied
access to a professional
career – sometimes even
to the thought of one.
But what of the effect
on the professions
themselves – the report
is surprisingly light on
this, beyond stressing
the need for as wide a
pool of talent as
possible.
Some years ago I was
involved with a group
set up with the aim of
improving access to the
legal profession for
members of ethnic
minorities. It was
supported by some of the
major law firms, and for
a simple reason: as
their businesses had
expanded both globally
and nationally it had
simply become untenable
that the composition of
their teams bore little
or no resemblance to
their clients.
I think these issues
are even more relevant
to consultancy teams.
Consultants probably do | |
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| | better than other
professions in one of
the areas highlighted by
the report – change of
career – because of
their hunger for
industry experience. But
they need to go deeper
than that. I was lucky
enough – courtesy of an
event organised by our
friends at Tribal Avail
– to meet Alan Milburn
himself, and was struck,
not just by his obvious
intelligence and the
clarity of his thinking
but the way in which he
used his whole life
experience to underpin
those thoughts. He spoke
eloquently about how
project after project
had failed to deliver
improvements to the
estate he grew up on,
not because they were
such bad ideas but
because they had been
imposed on people from
outside and without
their input.
For a consultant in a
change programme this
kind of empathy is
almost priceless – you
can be as bright as you
like, but if the people
you are dealing with
lead fundamentally
different lives to you
or anyone you know, it’s
going to be hard to
achieve. If the whole
industry begins to come
from an “officer class”
that is increasingly
isolated from both
economic hardship and
other social groups, I
fear its effectiveness
will be increasingly
undermined. I also
believe that a
monoculture is bad for
consultancies
internally. Too narrow a
scope of recruitment can
both limit the
intellectual scope of a
consultancy and underpin
a dysfunctional working
culture.
The report calls for
wide-reaching changes,
in government, in
education, in the way
the professions engage
with potential entrants
and it explicitly
acknowledges that no one
organisation can tackle
this issue in isolation.
Nevertheless, in its 80
recommendations there is
much food for thought
for anyone charged with
recruiting the next
generation of
consultancy talent. | |
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