Conservation Skills

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has been a benevolent employer to me. The job is exciting, the people wonderful and the sense of achieving something very motivating! I have also been allowed to become involved in work that might not seem to have obvious importance to Wildlife Conservation.

During the last significant recession in the 1980s, the government implemented a major job creation scheme. At its peak The Trust, with only nine core staff itself, was employing another 100 Community Programme workers. One of the key pieces of organisational learning to emerge from our 1984-88 programme was the importance of training and skills.

We were carefully able to pool funds to create a significant training budget. This was used to ensure that everyone on our community scheme could do their job properly. The results were very rewarding. We achieved really good quality work and the success rate of participants returning to mainstream employment was very high. The participants got better jobs, the government reduced unemployment and Gloucestershire’s wildlife got a better deal!

Because of our experience in Gloucestershire, I was asked to participate in drafting the first vocational nature conservation qualification, an NVQ. The team that put the NVQ together comprised people actually doing the jobs that the qualification was designed for. But the end result was far from perfect because the educational machinery of Whitehall in the 1990s insisted on a structure and language that made the NVQ obscure and inaccessible.

Almost 20 years later, employers and employees still make the case that vocational qualifications are not quite what they want. Lantra and the other 24 Sector Skills Councils are now well placed to shape vocational education. But there is still a large gap between the future skills needs of industries like environmental conservation and the competences of those trying to gain work in the best jobs around. Skills supply and demand has a place even in the work of the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust.

Photograph (c) The Wildlife Trusts