Posted by Frances IoM on 06/08/2020 13:34:23:
the jobs that will be needed for many school leavers will not require real skill just mere ability to operate a coffee machine …

Posted by jann west on 06/08/2020 13:33:59:

It's sad! Generally speaking … Apparently (injury/negligence/etc.) insurance for metalwork training schools is very expensive, and the consumables are also expensive (whoops – someone forgot to turn off the argon on a welder and the college's entire tank leaked out overnight … happened at CNWL the year I was there … oops!) … far easier and more profitable to teach courses in "digital marketing" etc.

Posted by jann west on 06/08/2020 13:33:59:

It's sad! Generally speaking … Apparently (injury/negligence/etc.) insurance for metalwork training schools is very expensive, and the consumables are also expensive (whoops – someone forgot to turn off the argon on a welder and the college's entire tank leaked out overnight … happened at CNWL the year I was there … oops!) … far easier and more profitable to teach courses in "digital marketing" etc.

here is the real reason, it is not that there is no demand for engineering courses, it is that they are comparitively very unprofitable to deliver, when compared to media studies and "digital marketing". The colleges do not care that there is no jobs at the end of them, they have already made their profit, and they do not exist to train ppl, they exist to make profit!

Britain was made great , not directly by engineering, but by innovation, and THEN building the products and selling them to the world, and today, although China, Asia and Japan are now the powerhouses, they lack the one skill that made Britain great, they are not innovators, they do not respect patents, and they will copy and improve anything they can get their hands on. We need to go back to innovation, but in order to do that we need a root and branch overhaul of the patent system, which for too long has allowed companies to ammass "intellectial property" by the mere act of saying "wouldn't it be good and profitable if we could do this", then patenting it, and waiting for some poor mug to do the hard work, and then surfacing (they are known as submarine patents), and using their financial clout and their in house patent attorneys to steal the idea, or bankrupt the inventor with a long legal battle, and steal the idea anyway. Reform could be as simple as introducing a rule that there is no patent without a working prototype, and that patent gives you 5 years to bring the idea to market, after which time the patent expires, and others can have a go.

We are in a situation today where there is no innovation, because there is no research into any field that already has patents, even if the owners of the patents are doing absolutely nothing with them, and inventors have long ago given up on the patent system, as it lacks any protection for them unless they are very wealthy. Mr Dyson spends millions every year just defending his patents.

So how to get the rest of the world to recognise and respect patents? simple, deny access to your marketplace to ALL that countries products untill they do!

The problem with the service industry, is that it employs very few people, returns large profits to even fewer,and is at the mercy of the ups and downs of the worlds financial state, and to imagine that the younger generation are going to pay for our pensions on their minimum waged employment is farcial, and also not the way pension funds work! We are going vaguely in the right direction by getting out of Europe, and now the Europeans companies have taken over our major (albiet lame duck) industries we have a clean slate to start rebuilding from the ground up. We need to lobby government to make these changes to make sure that good ideas get the protection they deserve, and therefore do not have to leave the UK in order for the innovators to profit from them. Export or die still applies!

Phil

Posted by john halfpenny on 06/08/2020 15:24:33:

Nevertheless Dave, we cannot all wash each others windows.