This recovery trend, which ranges from flat to very slowly rising, means that many businesses that are not diversified will be facing extreme difficulties and will be eating into capital reserves just to stay afloat – and if their reserves are not big enough and they cannot switch markets, then they will go bankrupt. As part of their actions to avoid this, most organisations, especially businesses, look towards cutting their fixed and discretionary expenses, hopefully without aversely impacting their ability to ride the up-wave of a recovery. Unfortunately, there are two ‘easy targets’ for cost cutting – mainly because of the budgetary impact – and these are the FTE (full time equivalent) headcount and the staff development costs, which includes training.

Cutting either of these two could have a hugely detrimental impact on the ability of the organisation to respond quickly, flexibly and effectively to a recovery and it could and should be argued that both should be amongst the last to be cut – none the less, the short-term and immediate realities of survival often take priority over the calm assessment of what is best for the organisation, and the HR budget gets cut.

When the recovery comes, fearful of a double-dip recession or something similar happening, organisations are slow to recruit new and replacement staff and even slower to engage in staff development.

Organisational expenditure on training and staff development is, therefore, amongst the first things to be cut when a recession looms and is one of the last to be reinstated and this makes it a leading indicator of a down turn in the economy and a trailing indicator of a recovery. So, for the providers of training, their market cycle is one of short-term peaks and long-term troughs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that training providers saw an immediate, dramatic and sometimes fatal down turn that started in September 2007 and is still a long way short of recovering.

This market impact spills over into the discretionary educational sector as well. By discretionary, I am referring to the higher education sector that delivers practitioner degrees such as MBAs. Whereas a Masters degree student generally enters onto their course on a full time basis, usually straight from a Bachelors degree course, an MBA student is generally working full time and studying in the evenings and at weekends – and are often sufficiently junior in the management hierarchy for their jobs to be at risk in an economic downturn. This makes potential MBA students think twice before committing their time and money to pursuing a course at such a time. In turn, this impacts enrolment at business schools (in particular) and low student numbers is common during economic downturns thus choking off curriculum development and investment in facilities and research. Again, anecdotal evidence suggests that business school enrolment and attendance is currently at a near record low and is only now showing some signs of recovery – and the business schools that are seeing numbers growing steadily are those that have used the downturn to re-think their MBA curriculum and to distance themselves from the types of programme that are too closely associated with the actions of business leaders that brought about the crisis in the first place.

One rather disturbing outcome of this recessionary impact on the training development and higher education sector, is that many of the instructors, seminar leaders and lecturers have found their work drying up and their contracts not being renewed and so they have diversified away from the training and educational sector and this may create an artificial shortage of qualified staff which in turn risks lowering the quality of the programmes on offer.

Alasdair White has been a workshop facilitator and seminar leader for the last 20 years and a business school lecturer for the last 11 and has survived the last two major recessions by diversification of activities.

On the face of it, it is just another ‘me too’ program to join the plethora of similar programs already available and which are discussed in a Wikipedia article. There has been an immediate ‘rush to judgment’ by the technology journalists and so far the reaction has been a case of ‘not bad, some good developments, but is it really different’ – in fact, is it other than a redundant derivative of Facebook and Twitter. In the UK, Dan Grabham of TechRadar posted his take on the msn tech & gadgets blog while Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land provided a US view. In the mean time, Paul Anthony enthused on the Webdistortion blog that “Google have nailed it when they realised that Facebook’s weakness was privacy” – but they might have nailed it as the problem but have they provided a real solution.

Other than a different approach to how and with whom you can share your online posts and an ability to interact with other Google products, what does Google+ bring to Google in terms of competitive advantage? The most obvious objective must be to cash in on the huge and growing social media marketing boom that is generating millions of pounds, dollars and euros for the SM providers and not a lot of measurable ROI for the advertisers. That is an understandable business objective and it fits well with Google’s focus within its other product offerings.

Let’s not make any mistake about it, Google is not altruistic, it is not providing users with free search engine facilities (or email, or maps, and now SM) because it believes in freedom of speech, making knowledge available and in the good of mankind – no, it is providing these services so that advertisers can get their ‘ads’ in front of a carefully targeted online audience on a regular and consistent basis and that makes good sense to the advertisers and they are willing to pay well for the privilege – and, in turn, that makes Google a lot of money. In fact, Google makes more than just a lot of money: in 2010, the net revenue was around $8.44 billion on a turnover of around $30 billion. But if one digs around a bit, then figures released for the 1^stQ 2011 suggests that the Google earnings trend is broadly flat (even if it’s still a lot of money) and so it makes sense to see if this flattening trend can be turned upwards through new products.

The problem is that Google+ is not a new product, but a ‘me too’ offering and the people who will use it are almost certainly already on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Perhaps the younger end of the SM market, those addicted to free email (think gmail, Google’s email offering) and with a highly ambivalent attitude towards personal privacy, will like the idea of integrating their Google products, but the serious networker using SM programs for business and professional use should be highly wary of any attempt by Google to take more of the market.

From a security and privacy point of view, Google is potentially dangerous. To make their targeted advertising platform work efficiently, they have to know a great deal about their users: where they search and visit online, what they write in emails, what they watch (remember, Google owns YouTube), and now who they network with and what they post. Google does this by monitoring usage and searching for keywords and, given the volume of material, this is obviously done by a sophisticated and highly crafted algorithm-based program. Although this is a technological process and is, one hopes, currently only used in this way, it is, none-the-less, still ‘reading other people’s’ mail’ so to speak and it is only a small step (and a lot of computing power) to a full scale monitoring of users’ communications in a way that is currently only associated with places like the GCHQ (in the UK) and the National Security Agency (in the US). For a business or professional user, this could be placing their commercial and intellectual property in jeopardy.

What Google relies on is the benign appearance they present as an altruistic provider of free and extremely useful services and the fact that online users, especially the younger end of their client-base, are extremely ambivalent about personal privacy: they are not concerned about who knows what about them but they are concerned by what use other people make of that information.

On the whole, I believe SM programs are a ‘good thing’: they encourage and facilitate communication and interaction and they certainly make networking easier. But with 640 million registered users on Facebook (around 29% of all internet users in the world), and with none of the other SM programs coming close, the most likely place from which Google+ will get is registered users is by attracting members from the plethora of small programs and it seems unlikely that Google+ will come anywhere near challenging Facebook in the foreseeable future. Now, since Google+ is a ‘me too’ with a few new ideas (but almost no real innovations), the competitive advantage it hopes to achieve is very difficult to see, and if there is no real competitive advantage, it is unlikely to attract users and it will fail in the same way as Buzz failed.

This then begs the question of why Google is launching their SM offering at all – it does not seem to have a competitive advantage, it is operating in a near saturated market, it is unlikely to challenge the market leader, and unless it attracts significant membership, it will not generate advertising revenue. Is this a matter of hubris, of poor strategic thinking, of a lack of innovative thinking, or simply a lack of vision? Google has for some time been engaged in a sustained business war with Microsoft and seems to believe it can avoid the disasters that the latter has suffered as users and governments have turned against them and their domineering and anti-competitive business strategies. But Google is already being targeted for similar behaviour and it would be wise to have a strategic re-think before something ‘expensive’ happens.

Google, like Microsoft, is an aging member of the internet and ICT community and it needs to concentrate on its core activities rather than getting involved in potentially costly distractions.

There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to assessment in an academic environment: there are the ‘knowledge testers’ and the ‘skills developers’. While both are right in their own way, it is only through combining their approaches that a sustainable and performance-enhancing assessment process emerges.

Some recent research shows that performance measurement is the best way to boost performance and effectiveness – and this confirms the empirical evidence that is so well understood by those of us involved in performance management and so little understood, it seems, by some in academic circles. To boost performance we first need to benchmark the current level and then monitor development as we apply performance-enhancing processes to it.

In the early stages of academic development – the primary and secondary school levels – the process of education is to provide the pupil with data which, when contextualised, can be converted to information and, to a great extent, the pupil is expected to remember this as it forms the knowledge base for their future adult life. There is little focus on ‘academic skills’ (the application of knowledge within context), as the pupil must first establish a foundation from which to work. The assessment process at this stage must, therefore, of necessity focus on measuring the retention of information – in other words, ‘test what they know’.

Towards the end of secondary school, usually at around the age of 16 years, the focus of the educational process has to change from pure information collection and retention towards the application of that information within a context so that it can become embedded as knowledge itself. This is the initial development of fundamental but rather basic academic skills. If the pupil is heading on towards tertiary education at a college or university, these fledgling academic skills are the foundation on which that tertiary educational career is based. Clearly, therefore, the assessment process also needs to change from the measurement of retained information to the measurement of academic skills such as research, academic essay writing, the process of analysis, the weighing up of the evidence and the drawing of safe conclusions.

When the pupil becomes a tertiary-level student, this process must continue so that by the time they graduate with a Bachelors degree they have fully mastered the academic skills and can apply them rigorously, consistently and successfully. The assessment process at the tertiary level must, of necessity, focus much less on the retention of information and much more on skills development and the student’s performance in applying them.

If the tertiary assessment process is properly developed then the results act as a feedback loop for the students so that they can determine what skills they are weak in and can focus on the development of those specific skills. Similarly, the results can act as a feedback loop for the lecturers so that they can modify their lecturing/teaching to ensure that students have developed the right skills by specific milestones in their tertiary educational progress. If lecturers take the time to analyse the students’ results, they can determine whether they are teaching the right things at the right time and in the right way. Perhaps we should acknowledge that when a student fails a course, a programme or a degree in a university environment this is as much a result of inappropriate teaching methodology and misaligned assessment processes as it is of student ability, or the lack thereof.

Unfortunately, many tertiary education curricula are modularised and the courses are independent and self-contained elements in which the lecturer has to deliver specific and defined bodies of information. This tends to apply pressure to the assessment process and push it in a retrograde direction so that it focuses on ‘information (or knowledge) retention’. Of course, such a process is easier from the lecturer’s perspective as it requires less time to mark and, in situations in which group sizes are large, this can be a critical if undesirable factor.

But this has an unhelpful outcome as far as the students are concerned: it pushes them into retrograde learning behaviours in which they ‘study for exams’ rather than develop their skills. This, in turn, adversely impacts their performance in terms of academic skill development. The result, as often seen in university environments today, is for students to be performing like school pupils and failing to achieve academic maturity. If this is not rectified, then the ultimate outcome will be students with a great deal of information in their minds but who lack the skills to apply it as knowledge – and thus they are of little use to future employers most of whom want to employ graduates who can think and analyse and draw conclusions rather than just ‘know a lot of stuff but not how to apply it’. Indeed, if this situation persists, tertiary educational institutes will be failing both their students and society as a whole and that is the start of a vicious downward spiral.

If the institutions are getting caught in this vicious spiral then the logical outcome will be that their graduating students will find it harder and harder to gain appropriate employment – they will not be ‘fit for purpose’ – the institutions’ reputation will suffer and they will find themselves facing a declining number of applications for places. In the end, courses, degree programmes and even institutions will have to close. This will then make for greater competition for places at the remaining institutions resulting in an overall decline in student numbers to the general detriment of society.

It is, therefore, in the enlightened self-interest of all tertiary education institutions to refocus their assessment procedures to ensure that graduating students have the essential academic skills and know how to apply them – this means that lecturers must resist the temptation to assess on a ‘retained information’ basis and must demand that progress is made in academic skills. One way this might be achieved is for the institutions to more clearly define what skills have to be practised and displayed at each level and to rigorously apply these standards and benchmarks. This will require a coordinated assessment strategy within the institution with the acquisition and delivery of these standard skills at each level being prerequisites for progress to the next level. An example of this is, of course, is the dissertation that most undergraduates have to write – failure in the dissertation module means a failure to graduate. Finding someway of doing this at each level in a degree programme must be an imperative if the assessment process is to drive performance and thus deliver the desired outcome of students well equipped for the outside world.