The right to request time off to train
May 16, 2008
This week Gordon Brown released plans to give UK employees the right to request time off to participate in training activities or complete qualifications, in the same way that some parents have the right to request flexible working. This right will be part of an educational bill to come into force next April.
This is a curious development. The skills agenda seems to be quite a big issue at the moment and the Government is making a lot of plans to try to increase skills within the labour force, but I’m not sure that people not having time off to carry out qualifications is such a big problem. I’ve recently talked about the benefits (or lack of) of formal qualifications in relation to skill development, and so I’m not sure that this is necessarily the answer to the regularly reported ‘skills gap’. But perhaps the new right isn’t really to do with that, it may be more to do with the rights of people to develop themselves and to achieve their personal educational and career goals. However as John McGurk of the CIPD says in the news report I’ve read, training opportunities should contribute to the business needs of the employer, and if the request is for training that is not going to help these needs, then the employer should be able to refuse the request. This would mean employees could not take time off to train for a career that was different to the job they were currently carrying out.
I’ve been training outside of my full time job for four years, half of which I did in the evenings outside of work time, and half I was able to take time off work to attend. Of course it was better for me to attend in work hours so I wasn’t studying until late, but to be honest if I couldn’t have done that I would have still done the course in the evenings as I was committed to it and wanted to complete it. Completing a qualification is hard when you work as well, and I think that many of the people who are really committed to this option would do so somehow without this right. Also, I’m not sure giving the right to request time off to train will increase the amount of people doing courses; what if you couldn’t afford to take the pay cut to have the time off? On the other hand maybe a positive thing about the right is that it would probably receive a lot of publicity (if the right to request flexible working is anything to go by) and would therefore maybe advertise the possibilities of gaining new skills and qualifications to people who had not really thought about it before
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