Vocational Training in France and Britain: Office Work

Better pre-planning of work is a familiar requirement for improved productive efficiency; this has manifested itself for some decades in a tendency for an increasing proportion of the workforce to be transferred from physical production on the factory floor to ‘paper work’ in offices—that is, to administrative and clerical activities. That tendency has been offset, especially in the past decade, by advances in data processing machinery allowing clerical activities to be performed very much more quickly and by fewer staff. The total number of employees required for administrative and clerical tasks has fluctuated according to the relative strength of these tendencies. The required quality, or technical capabilities, of such staff has also fluctuated: for 100 years or more, clerical and office staff were usually required to follow formal procedures on direct instructions from a superior; much work was of a purely routine and repetitive nature. The first phase of automation using mainframe computers and central processing facilities did little to alter this situation, and may even have led to further fragmentation and simplification of tasks.