You Want Fries With That Diploma?

Why stay in school when you can get a degree and earn money at the same time?

It sounds like the beginning of a bad infomercial, but in actuality it's one of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's new ideas to close his country's productivity gap.

As part of his campaign to improve the skill level of Britain's labor force, Brown plans to let employers hand out nationally recognized diplomas.

McDonald's, along with budget airline Flybe and infrastructure firm Network Rail, will be the first three businesses to take advantage of the new privilege to award employees certificates "up to the standards of A-Levels," an advanced secondary-school degree that serves as the equivalent of an entrance exam for many British universities.

But rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic, businesses will be teaching classes that provide industry training to their employees. McDonalds, for instance, plans to offer a course in shift management.

Brown says the program is both a step toward giving proper recognition and credit to existing training programs, but to encourage companies to invest in teaching employees vocational skills.

The measure is a part of a larger effort to improve the prospects of his country's legions of unskilled workers. Brown also plans to require the unemployed to learn skills and to enlist the private sector to help the long-term unemployed find work.

But will broadening the definition of "diploma" end up doing more harm than good?

The success of Brown's new measure depends not only on businesses creating on-the-job training, but on universities and employers accepting such degrees. Will Oxford and Cambridge—or, for that matter, the University of East Anglia or the Birmingham College of Food, Tourism, and Creative Studies—look favorably on an A-level in, say, Airline Cabin Service? Will the training offered by one employer may be too specific to be useful to others, rendering the diploma valueless?

Perhaps most importantly, Brown's broader approach to awarding diplomas may backfire. The measure de-emphasizes the importance of traditional, broader education, in favor of narrowly tailored vocational skills that could end up painting workers into a corner.

by Liz Gunnison