Do you think of Finland as the first place to recruit promising youth into your organisation?

Probably not for many of you! But one of the most impressive assessment programmes of all time has just released its latest results. And they give some very interesting (but not entirely encouraging) insight into European youth competence, including that Finland has the best-educated 15-year olds in Europe.

The OECD runs a programme called PISA which assesses the competence of 15-year olds internationally. They run tests every 3 years and earlier this week have published the results of the 2009 tests. In 2009, they assessed 470,000 teenagers in 65 countries in reading, maths and science, and used rigorous psychometrics and statistics to compare the different countries. They test 15-year olds as these are towards the end of their school education and show the results of country's education systems.

PISA gives us information on the quality of the future recruitment pool as today's 15 year olds are tomorrow's entrants into the job market. They also of course pass a judgement on the quality of European schools.

You can see figures on the top 30 countries below.

The most obvious and headline news is that the Shanghai region of China and South Korea educate their 15 year olds better than anywhere in the world. This has received a lot of attention worldwide, for instance USA today reports that US Education Secretary Arne Duncan calling the results "an absolute wake-up call for America ... we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education."

As you can see in the table above, the only two European countries to get in the top ten in the world are Finland and Netherlands. You've probably seen some headlines in your own country - depending on your position in the table, there is pleasure or pain.

I really hope European politicians take note and act. Europe will not become a successful knowledge economy, without better education.

But as an assessment professional, it's great to see an assessment getting the attention of our political leaders. Assessments provide data that can tell you what is happening in your organisation; and data gives power to change things. As the old saying goes, if you cannot measure a thing, how do you know it's there. And by measuring competence, we can act to improve it.

The OECD have published a huge volume of data surrounding the assessments, so if you want to dig into the data, it's all there for you. See their 2009 results page to get you started. From there you can dig into several detailed analysises with good graphs and explanations.

The OECD also make some analysises of why some countries have better results than others, one point they make is that there is a strong effect from paying teachers well - for more information on this, see my blog entry on the Questionmark site.

From a recruitment perspective, the most obvious impact is that if you are recruiting across Europe, then there are wide differences in competence. If you have a choice of where you are recruiting, and you want people strong in reading/analysis skills or maths or science, then look at the tables to see where the education system is producing the best people.

It might be a controversial thought but if Finland produces the best-educated 15 year olds in Europe, then should you be recruiting there?

Last update : 20-12-2010 09:17

Keywords : Should you move your European recruitment to Finland? PISA, Competence, recruitment, John Kleeman

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