Friday 6 July 2012

Degrees of separation

Ever met a taxi driver who has a degree? If your answer to that is yes, then Professor Alan Felstead's lecture would have resonated.
His quantitative research into skills utilisation in the UK has thrown up a host of interesting conclusions.
He found that the UK government has had great success in equipping people with degrees, but has not been so successful in providing jobs that required said degrees.
He also found that over the years, people feel that they have had to work harder, and have less control over what they get to do in their jobs.
On the plus side, more people have had more training over the years, although this training seems to be overly concentrated on a smaller, younger, more prominent group.
Worryingly, his data shows that as workers get older, training slows down, which is a challenge for the adult continuing education sector.
While all his data has been culled from UK sources, IAL has carried out its own survey in skills utilisation in Singapore, so it would be interesting to see how similar (or different) the results may be.
But even without looking at these results, I find Prof Felstead's results distressingly familiar to my experiences in Singapore.
Disagree? Have you been reading our newspaper headlines recently?
Thoughts?

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