I am mightily hacked off at ILA Scotland, the public sector organisation which issues £100 or £200 vouchers (depending on income) which can be redeemed against the cost of formal learning courses across the country. The scheme is a way of encouraging you to continue your education every year with the help of a discount. Or so you thought.
I got my £100 ILA learning voucher for 2008 and spent a few otherwise billable working hours looking for a course to take. I found an excellent SQL course done through online learning from a Scottish college, so I sent off my registration forms and my voucher code.
The whole package was returned to me with a printout from ILA’s internal registration system saying that “this learner’s scheme does not allow ILA support for this course”.
Now, I was not aware that ILA had particular “learning schemes”, so I wrote them to see what was going on. They wrote back to say that “If you have the £200 account you can use this towards all courses registered with ILA Scotland. If you have the £100 account you can use this towards all the courses that are registered under the £100 scheme with ILA Scotland.” Confused? I went on to their web site to acquaint myself with their micromanagement. There were five SQL courses labeled as £200 courses, including the one I wanted to take, even though that particular course only cost £100. Confused again? But there were no SQL courses listed under the £100 account, even though (as I said) the course only cost £100. This means I cannot take any of the five courses unless I pay the full fee out of pocket.
It’s always frustrating when a customer experience is ruined by a company’s internal dithering, but the real rub is in ILA Scotland’s own promotional language. They say that “you can now apply for an Individual Learning Account that will give you up to £100 a year to put towards a range of courses which focus on the particular skills employers are looking for”.
But I AM my employer, and this IS the skill I’m looking for. Who are they to tell me what I do and don’t need as a business owner?
This is how they answer that question: “Many of the courses will help you to develop the skills that employers are looking for - you can build your computer skills, or even improve your communication and customer handling skills.”
Ah. The cat’s out of the bag. For all their noise and PR, ILA Scotland is merely another arm of the call centre racket. They want you to mould yourself to the Glasgow job market, not mould yourself around the direction your career is actually headed.
If you have a certain set of skills and want to expand them even further, you are officially less important than someone who needs help to figure out how to wear a headset and write complete sentences. If you dare to want more in life than “Hello, thank you for calling Pee Mobile, how can I help you?”, you’re micromanaged out of the system.
And wouldn’t it follow that someone whose income met the threshhold to merit the £100 voucher would be looking for more advanced courses, while people on lower incomes who merit the £200 voucher would be more in need of basic skills? Yes, but the ILA system maintains the exact opposite.
Losing out on the SQL course has been a personal disappointment, but it is just as disappointing to learn that yet another of Scotland’s much vaunted public systems is merely a means of catering to the lowest common denominator.
