Qualifications of new undergraduates (higher indicates more stringent entry standards)
Student staff ratio
Services and facilities spending per student
Percentage of students achieving a degree or transferring to other institutions
Percentage of graduates achieving first or upper second class honours degrees
Percentage of graduates in graduate level employment or further study six months after graduation.
These criteria are not universally accepted and are not comprehensive, eg. graduate salaries 2 years after graduation might be a useful indicator, but is harder to compile. Despite that, the Times rankings have achieved a degree of acceptance as one useful indicator of institutional standing, and are eagerly studied by students, parents, academics and bureaucrats.
The Top 10 are:
Oxford
Cambridge
Imperial College
London School of Economics
St Andrews
Warwick
University College London
Durham
York
Bristol
The Times’ league tables have a host of information by subject area, disability, ethnicity, etc.. Although Oxford may top the overall rankings, when it comes to subject area rankings, Cambridge is top in 37 out of 61 individual subjects, whereas Oxford is top in just 5.
One of the least surprising findings is that 3 years after graduating, one third of graduates wish they’d chosen a different course.
I’m afraid my alma mater Brunel has been slipping down the rankings and now sits in the middle at #52. Because of my responsibilities as a board member of New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission, I also keep an eye on Sheffield at #22 and Birmingham at #25: by some measures these equate roughly with the best NZ universities. (That’s not an official TEC position, by the way; it is a hotly disputed comparison!)
Having been in the UK for just over a fortnight, I had thought to write a short post on similarities of current issues in Britain and New Zealand. However, Owld Grumbleton, who’s over here as well, has beaten me to it, so here’s his take:
The Labour-led governments are in trouble, after multiple terms in office.
House prices are stalling and predicted to fall, with owners of multiple highly-leveraged rental properties expected to be hardest hit .
The economy is faltering but not expected to go through the floor.
The retirement of the baby boomers is now starting to bite, with major gaps in most technical and managerial professions. Although the current downturn will alleviate the problem, it won’t help the solution as firms skimp on recruiting and developing young talent.
Violent crime, uncouth behaviour and increased alcohol consumption are constant features of news reports and general discussion.
School exam systems are still lambasted on all sides.
People expect lower taxes, but the government is proving stingy with minor reductions in this year’s budget.
Environmental awareness is growing, but government initiatives are often clumsy, inconsequential and fail to address the major issues.
City traffic is a nightmare.
The local wine industry is thriving. (Yes, you read that right.)
OG is more political than me, but it’s hard to dodge the similarities in attitudes to the incumbent governments. I’d add a few more similarities:
There is heaps of cool stuff going on business-wise, if you look for it.
Everyone’s screaming about petrol prices.
The universities want more money (when did they not?)
There’s really good food. wine, beer and cider, and and there’s really appalling food, wine, beer and cider.
There’s increasing talk of protectionism, under the false flag of environmentalism.
The countryside is beautiful.
The cultural life is thriving.
There are great people, nice people, naff people and scary people.
The media tend to paint the picture darker than it really is.
NZ sauvignon blanc and pinot noir rule their wine store/supermarket niches (pinot gris is starting to move up the ranks too).
In a presentation (below) at TED2007, educationalist and tech pioneer Alan Kay brings together two interests of mine, education and technology. I’ve written before about the importance of pre-teens understanding basic mathematics and algebra as a key indicator of general career success and as a prerequisite to increase the likelihood of teenagers engaging with with technical subjects at school. The trick is using tools and learning techniques that kids will find fun - like dropping fruit and bowling balls off buildings, and doing stuff on the computer. Alan shows how 6 year olds can learn about variables, acceleration and gravity, using deceptively simple tools on a $100 OLPC laptop ( from the One Laptop Per Child project - actually US$200, but still every school should be able to have these in every class).
Alan starts slow but the pace picks up once the OLPC appears.
“Those who can — do. Those who can’t — teach.” H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It’s an oft-repeated adage, wrongly attributed to everybody from Confucius to GB Shaw. It’s also nonsense.
In conversation over a beer with the CEO of a moderately well-known IT company, we both acknowledged the start we’d received from our early employers, who had run excellent in-house training and development programs. Admittedly, these were very large companies, but today well-structured and cohesive integrated career development programmes seem to have gone from even those firms, replaced by short-term, needs-driven, just-in-time training - still valuable, but lacking a long-term people-investment focus.The most severe case I’ve seen is the demise of the civil service training programmes, but it applies to most businesses, large and small. Partly, it’s short-term cost-saving now made normal; partly, it’s a consequence of the demise of the old long-term employment relationship (driven more by employees than by employers, I’d argue).
I started my career working for a UK-based IT company called ICL (Fujitsu in most markets today). One of the more amazing facets of their training regime (they had over 200 full-time training staff) was the very clear understanding that, if you wanted high office and rapid promotion, you had to do a stint (usually a year) as a trainer, before you could move up This was particularly true of the management and sales streams. In other words, their trainers were their best managers and sales people. It’s an old idea first developed by the military - your best troops and officers are more valuable training others to be like them, than being expended on the front line.
How many organisations today would take their stars out of the line to train the next generation?
Yesterday, I introduced Professor Paul Callaghan to you. He’s very passionate about the importance of science and technology to our future economic success. He too makes my oft-repeated point that kids will take up science and engineering if they are excited by the opportunities that those careers present.
I have a strong view that getting parents and kids (at a young age) excited about those career opportunities is the responsibility of industry, not “the government”, but I add a proviso: that children have been taught maths well in their earlier years.
The ability to understand algebra at age 13 is a key indicator of future earnings, whatever career is chosen. If children haven’t grasped algebra by the 3rd form (or whatever year/grade it’s called these days), they’ll turn away from the physical sciences and technologies. This isn’t an issue just with producing future scientists and engineers. We also need skilled trades-people and technicians, and by implication we want middling students to enjoy the physical sciences too.
I have huge respect for good maths teachers - they helped make me who I am. I just wish that there were more great teachers of mathematics - teaching at all levels, not just the brightest students. Average students who understand basic algebra have far more options.
To paraphrase Professor Callaghan, “If they have the maths, we can take care of the rest“.
Research has shown a relationship between future earnings and courses taken in high school. Some of the strongest relationships are between earnings and the number and type of math courses (Rose and Betts, 2001). In turn, courses taken in high school depend on the preparation students receive in middle school. Therefore, it is important to look at access to algebra, type of algebra available, and enrollment in the classes that signal the most-advanced middle school students.
Footnote 1: Beginning in 2000, the CDE (California Dept of Education) identified seventh- and eighth-grade enrollment in intermediate algebra as important data to track in the CBEDS data collection.
Anne Danenberg, Christopher Jepsen, Pedro Cerdán, 2002
PUBLIC POLICY INSTITUTE OF CALIFORNIA
I enjoyed listening to a radio interview of Professor Paul Callaghan last Sunday morning. I was supposed to be in the gym, but ended up sitting in the car for an hour until the interview ended. Paul is the director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, one of NZ’s newest research institutes, based at at Victoria University in Wellington. He’s a leading physicist, a superb teacher, and the 2007 Royal Society of NZ Distinguished Speaker.
Paul described himself as an enthusiastic late-comer to the overlap between science and business. He is on something of a campaign right now to extol the importance of science and technology to the future well-being of the NZ economy. His message could apply to almost any nation. If you’ re in NZ, go along to one of his upcoming lectures. You’ll enjoy his presentation and hopefully be moved by his messages.
Following yesterday’s cabinet reshuffle in New Zealand, I now have a minister for me. Pete Hodgson has been made responsible for:
economic development
research science & technology
tertiary education.
It’s a smart move to have one minster responsible for these 3 interlinked portfolios - all stuff I’m engaged in. Think about it - my own personal cabinet minister!
Actually, I still have several others ministers to deal with: ICT (retained by David Cunliffe - good), trade (still Phil Goff - good) and labour (now Trevor Mallard - good minister but controversial because of recent Parliamentary fisticuffs).
I enjoy reading economist Chris Dillow, even if he infuriates me occasionally. His take on life is very different : he’s a self-proclaimed Marxist who writes for several respected financial and business journals, he doesn’t have much truck with ideology, right or left, but he’s (usually) a believer in markets - where they aren’t sullied by monopolists and politicians. He doesn’t have much time for professional bosses either, and sees managerialism as another form of value capture by vested interests. All this makes for an interesting read. Even if you don’t agree with him (which I’m sure bothers him not one jot), at least he makes you think. While on my travels, I had time to read his blog in a more leisurely fashion, and I thought you might be interested in some of his articles. First up, his thoughts on biases against science:
Professor Mark Pepys says “grossly inadequate” education has left most people “tone deaf” to science. I fear he’s right. But the problem isn’t confined to schools. There’s a vast number of biases that stop people thinking scientifically.
First, a matter of definition. Science is not merely, or even mainly, a body of facts. If it were, the problem of scientific ignorance would be easily solved.
Instead, the importance of science lies in its method - the way in which theories (stress the plural) are challenged against as much evidence as possible. In this sense, even scientists often fail to be scientific, as Richard Dawkins and James Watson have recently shown. And many doctors have a notoriously vague grasp of probability.
I reckon there are at least four biases against the scientific method:
1. The power of authority. From infanthood onwards, we’re brought up to believe authority. It’s often sensible to do so. Parents and teachers know more than us. And it’s just impractical to work everything out for ourselves. But the scientific method requires that we believe not people but the evidence - and, indeed, are sceptical even of that. In this sense, Lord Rees - president of the Royal Society - was encouraging anti-science when he spoke recently of the “scientific consensus.” You don’t reach the truth through opinion polls.
2. The power of anecdote. People believe single, salient stories more than thousands of statistical data points. Take the question: does the MMR vaccine cause autism? The proper way to answer this is to fill in the four boxes (jab/no jab, autism/no autism) to establish correlations, and to ask: what are the possible mechanisms linking the vaccine to autism? Instead, people preferred the vivid story: “the son of a friend of a friend had the jab, and a few weeks later seemed to have autism.“ Few asked the scientific questions: how representative is this story? What’s the mechanism? The media perpetuate this bias. Journalists much prefer the human interest story to dry statistical inference. But you don’t necessarily get to the truth through entertainment.
3. The cult of self-expression. Everyone thinks they “have a right to an opinion”, a views fostered by vox pops and phone-in programmes. But opinion doesn’t matter. What matters is evidence and thought. Proper science is democratic in the sense that it considers all evidence, from whomsoever it comes. But it’s not democratic in the sense that it gives weight to the idle opinion of every passer-by.
4. Overconfidence. It’s very easy for our confidence in our opinion to grow faster than the evidence. This is especially likely if our achievements in one field win us prizes and esteem. This, I suspect, is part of the reason for James Watson’s unfortunate utterances.
The message here is that it’s not just schools to blame for scientific illiteracy. Indeed, the scientific method is profoundly unnatural - that’s why it took mankind millennia to stumble upon it.
As reported earlier, I’ve been interim chair of the Tertiary Education Commission for a short while, pending the appointment of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. I’m glad to tell you that the Minister of Tertiary Education has appointed David Shand as TEC’s new chair, with effect from 27 August 2007. It feels a bit like rejoining the lads behind the bike sheds, having been chief school prefect for a few weeks!
The global demand for ICT skills continues unabated, with the story repeated recently in Australia,Britain, Canada and the USA, despite offshoring IT jobs to lower cost countries. Computerworld covers a government report in New Zealand:
The demand for IT professionals has grown rapidly since 2001 …. Employment growth of IT professionals of 27.3% per annum was well above 2.8% growth for all occupations…. Only 64% of vacancies in the category could be filled and only 1.9 suitable applicants were identified per vacancy.
27% per annum for 5 years! And this in a country where IT tertiary degree programmes saw their intake halve since 2000 (though climbing again now). It must be sub-degree training and immigration that’s enabled such growth to be achieved, although that won’t solve the rapidly looming need to replace degree-trained specialists and managers as they retire and the global talent war heats up. Consulting firm Deloitte echoes CEO concerns that:
...the talent shortage will last for decades and that this poses a major crisis for the industry globally…. Technology companies in particular, which rely heavily on top talent to drive innovation, will suffer from this global problem. Over half of the companies surveyed said they plan to expand their workforce by more than 25% with the vast majority wanting to grow organically. However, all agree the biggest challenge to companies is finding, hiring and retaining qualified employees.
As I’ve noted in earlier articles, not only does IT need people, but so does the rest of industry, which looks to IT to solve skills shortages through smarter productivity. So while the IT career outlook is rosy, the outlook for IT services is even rosier.
You may recall my Best Business Book Title competition which invited you to submit ideas for the daftest book titles. The winner was ‘Corporate Uniformity: Brand Enforcement’ by the Mongrel Mob (submitted by En Avant reader Bwooce).
Well, just to show that life is stranger than fiction, The Times reports the launch, by four Italian management consultants of a new business handbook called ‘Cinema for Managers’ :
The [50] chosen films had been “interpreted for what they can teach rising executives about management techniques such as problem solving and teamwork, as well as issues such as globalisation and diversity”, said Professor Bogliari. Classic Westerns starring John Wayne are not just frontier tales of cowboys and Indians but lessons in “leadership, mission and loneliness at the top”.
In The Terminal, Tom Hanks plays an East European refugee who becomes stateless when trapped in the limbo of an airport, but who “devises a ground-breaking strategy for survival” and turns himself into a “creative entrepreneur”.
Similarly Penélope Cruz, as Raimunda in Volver (2006), “fulfils her dreams” by acquiring a restaurant against the odds and using her femininity “to handle working relationships and motivate her team” as well as to attract customers (though keeping a body — that of her abusive husband, murdered by her daughter whom he tried to assault — in a freezer is not good business practice).
I remember long ago watching management training videos starring John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker et al. Before you scoff, I should tell you that they were hilarious, but also very educational. But no, this ‘Cinema for Managers’ is just too silly.
Note: I’m only in the chair until they find someone better qualified than me - 3 months tops! Actually, the Commission’s board is strictly ‘governance’ - TEC’s CEO Janice Shiner is one of the best public sector leaders I’ve ever encountered. She and her team are doing an incredible job driving a major programme of tertiary education policy and funding reform, while at the same time they’ve successfully devised and implemented one of the biggest government agency restructurings in many years.
PS: Have you noticed that the public sector always uses ‘chair’ while the private sector generally uses ‘chairman’, irrespective of gender? Rosanne Meo very firmly claimed the chairman title when she chaired Baycorp in its glory days.
Neer Korn, an Australian market researcher, propounds that businesses shouldn’t hire Gen-Y because they are untrustworthy, disloyal, cynical, blah, blah, blah. Is he serious? Since he seems to run a serious business, more likely it’s just a headline-grabbing stunt, but according to an AAP report in the Herald:
In case any of the executives listening thought he was joking, Korn reiterated his warning: They’d get a better return on investment by hiring older people.
I think Korn really means ‘don’t hire very young people’, because he thinks they’re OK by their late 20s. Ian McKinnon, legendary former headmaster of Scots College and current Pro-chancellor of Victoria University, has often made the observation, based on a lifetime of teaching, that (and I paraphrase) - yes, society changes, but in every year of every generation:
4th formers (Year 10) are often stroppy,
university freshers often get drunk (and do other things they might regret later),
many new entrants to the workforce are unsure of what they want and struggle with adjusting to becoming working adults,
and most people evolve over time into something remarkably similar to their parents at the same age (adjusted for societal changes, education, life experiences and personality differences).
When I graduated in 1975, it was normal for young people in IT to move jobs every 3 years or so (as now). What’s new? I’ve never had a problem hiring young people (or older ones for that matter). It’s all about hiring people with the desired mix of skills, experience, potential, passion and principles, and providing them with good leadership, learning, development and job satisfaction.
As business leaders, we each need to keep renewing our industry talent pool, not only for the work young people can do today, but also to ensure that we’ll have experts and leaders in the future. To not do so is to freeload on the rest of industry.
On Monday I attended a farewell dinner for Russell Marshall, the retiring chairman of the NZ Tertiary Education Commission, of which I am a non-executive board member. Russell is one of life’s gentlemen, politically connected ( as you’d expect from an ex-priest now atheist, ex-MP, ex-Cabinet minister, ex-High Commissioner to Britain) , a great chairman, and all-round nice bloke, even if he still has delusions, at his age, of being a great scrum-half. Forget that old chestnut ‘I could’ve been a contender’ - Russell’s is ‘I could’ve been an All-Black’. Actually, Russell never said that, but he’d like to have - I jest.
I’ve had the privilege of working with Russell, and he’s been fantastic to work alongside. We’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but actually we agree on an awful lot of stuff. He says he’s not going to take on new roles, but I know him. Someone will ask him to help out, and he’ll not be able to say no, even if it’s just as an advisor/mentor.
Two great meals today. Lunch was courtesy of the Quiggs law firm, and featured Michael Cullen, NZ’s deputy PM, finance minister, leader of the house, and minister of tertiary education. While I don’t always agree with his party’s policy initiatives, I’ve found, as a Tertiary Education Commission board member under his mandate, that he’s a very effective minister. He’s also an informative, candid and witty speaker. TheChatham House Rule s prevent me repeating the conversation, but if you get the chance to meet Cullen in a small group setting, seize it.
Tonight I’ve been at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Hawke’s Bay. I can recommend the Hospitality School’s training restaurant. The food was quality - tasty, good looking, and accompanied by a beautiful Hawkes Bay Syrah. The student waiters were a little nervous, but hey, it’s the cheapest fine dining in town.
After dinner, I gave a speech to an EIT IT faculty student/employer evening, talking about some of the big changes the Tertiary Education Commission is implementing on behalf of the NZ Government. But my main theme was the role that we in the IT industry should play in attracting school students (with the support of their parents) into our industry. I’ve blogged about this before.
It was a fun evening, and I was thrilled to see that EIT arranges student internships with local IT organisations as part of its programmes. (I’m a former sandwich student myself, to use the UK jargon). The poster-size synopses of their internships and projects were an object lesson in good communication. The off-the-record Q&A session was great, with the audience really engaged with the issues. The Hawkes Bay Merlot afterwards was pretty good too.
I’ve been in London a week now, and the only way to describe the potential for IT services of all types is huge. Here’s the gist of the talk I’ve heard round the board table and the pub table:
The first big offshoring movement to India and Eastern Europe has abated somewhat. Offshoring legacy application replacement, maintenance and support, together with call centre and back-office processing, has largely happened. There’s always more to go, but a lot of what’s driving offshoring now is IT product companies shifting product development and maintenance to cheaper centres.
Enterprises are increasingly looking at IT to enable new market offers, new business channels, and to deal with ever-changing regulatory requirements. These new IT projects call for high-touch (i.e. close to the business, and not easily offshored) teams of consultants, analysts, architects, user interface specialists, and integrators, with business sector knowledge, local market knowledge, communication skills and facilitation skills. Generic technical expertise and code cutting is still important, but less so than in the past, except when it relates to the blending of new technologies with new business advantages.
The developed world (especially the English-speaking countries, Nordic countries and Japan) is increasingly worried about the greying and shrinking of its skilled workforce, and is looking to IT to solve the problem. This is despite the influx of younger workers from Asia and the newly-liberalised eastern Europe, who often don’t have the language, business and technical skills need for point 2.
However, the IT sector - both client side and vendor side - faces the same labour-force challenges, made worse by a major falloff in IT undergraduate intake post-Y2k and post-tech-wreck. Industry faces a crisis when that undersized cohort is needed to fill its IT leadership and senior technical roles.
Who’s in the best position to win from all this. Who can get the best leverage from scarce talent? It’s the IT services industry, in all its forms, but especially professional services, managed services, and software-as-a-service. Why? We can attract the best talent, drawn by the variety of working constantly with many clients, enjoying the pace of the vendor side, and wanting the career progression and personal development that comes with all that.
NB: At Fronde, we’re definitely geared up for point 2 projects and services, focusing on the way enterprises transact with the world, and agile teams working closely with our enterprise clients, supported by specialist managed services, and with good knowledge of both server-based solutions and software-as-a-service solutions. So I’m smiling.
Now I know that to some people this is crass, but if we’re honest, we all love league tables, especially if we’re at the top of them. The Top Ten in the 2007 research performance assessment round for the Tertiary Education Commission’s Performance-Based Research Fund are:
U of Otago 4.22
U of Auckland 4.19
U of Canterbury 4.10
Victoria U of Wellington 3.83
U of Waikato 3.73
Massey U 3.04
Lincoln U 2.96
Auckland UoT 1.86
Carey Baptist Colllege 1.67
Unitec (an Institute of Technology/Polytechnic) 0.96
While the top 5 are close, I have to acknowledge the improvement by Otago, who tipped Auckland out of the top spot. (Oh dear, I’m going to be in trouble when I next visit the City of Sails). Overall, the round reports a 41% lift in researchers with A rankings - which is great to see.
Now, who’s up for some international comparisons?
(This is a jocular dig at my friends in academia - TEC was injuncted by some of the universities to prevent TEC publishing a comparison with UK universities following the previous assessment round in 2003).
NZ writer and publisher Vicent Heeringa ( in Unlimited and now Idealog) has been one of the loudest cheerleadersfor NZ entrepreneurs and companies. But in a recent article - On the Road to Nowhere - he takes a very different stance, castigating successive governments and the business community for a marked failure to deliver on our potential. He blames us all:
By far the biggest culprits in this decline are me and you. We just don’t notice that we are getting poorer. There is no widespread electorate pain driving calls for change that a government is forced to listen to. Perhaps if we had a common land border with one of the richer nations we’d be more aware that their roads are better, their schools better equipped, their houses flasher and their inhabitants healthier and more prosperous.
At Idealog, we see a steady stream of creative Kiwis with passion and clever ideas. They’re inspiring but they’re small in number. And a bit like the wine industry, no matter how sexy, clever and successful, it’s small beans in economic terms. Our national economic performance requires a national ambition.
It’s time for a coherent, united and urgent response. I don’t want my children to grow up in a poor country. Do you?
As usual for Vincent, this is not so much a criticism as a call-to-arms. Let’s not waste too much time and energy looking at what failures we’ve been, and instead get on the right road by identifying and building what we need to do to get back up in the OECD upper quartile (top-half just doesn’t do it for me). I don’t for a minute think governments can do anything other than provide a platform on which entrepreneurs, companies and people can build the future, but we haven’t got the platform yet. That needs big, bold leadership of a shared vision by industry, both sides of Parliament, our public service, our local bodies, our education system and our media. That vision can incorporate all those things that make us distinctively who we are (or want to be). A growth agenda can include our social and environmental aspirations too.
We need to get excited about the future and committed to making it happen. I’m willing to sign up. What about the rest of you?
I heard an interesting interview on Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday Morning Programme, with David Coats talking about the public service. Coats is Associate Policy Director with UK think-tank The Work Foundation.
In an earlier post on telecommunications, I pleaded against state-imposed complexity and state institutions running telecommunications, on the grounds of cost and inflexibility. Coats argues for pragmatism in deciding when it’s appropriate to go to state or market solutions, which is fine if the decision makers are genuinely neutral. His context for such an approach is the re-empowerment (my word) of a strong and genuine public service ethos, which lets public servants concentrate on what they are there to do - serving the public. He uses the example of a librarian who, instead of kicking out the latch-key kids who’ve invaded her library after school, sets up a programme for them.
My own experience of the NZ Public Service tells me that most public servants are very keen to do a good job. However, they are Hide-bound (I use the word deliberately - Rodney Hide inadvertently caused a lot of this) by excessive compliance and political backside-covering, way way beyond anything the private sector would tolerate.
Let me give you a small but illustrative example. As the chair of TEC’s audit committee, I get a detailed report every month on how much we spend on various kinds of ‘politically-sensitive’ expenditure. Do we have a problem with inappropriate spending? Is the cost of preparing the report appropriate for the scale and risk of the expenditure? Do we make any decisions having received the information as a result? No, no, and no. Why do we do this? Because the SSC and Auditor-General want it, just in case someone asks a tricky question in Parliament. Our public service is grossly over-burdened with box-ticking, which says to everyone that box-ticking must the the way to do things, so the problem compounds over time.
An organisation’s true attitude to its purpose, obligations, processes (and the use of money) is driven not by compliance but by the culture and learned behaviours of the people who work there. They learn it from the demonstrated behaviours of their leaders (managerial and/or political). While I still have my concerns about public institutions sliding into bureaucracy for its own sake (again leadership is the answer), I do agree about the need to reinvigorate the public service ethos and to cut out the box-ticking.
You’ll all be aware of the strange phenomenon in recent times of “the national skills shortage”. While immigration might be part of the solution, it’s a problem across the developed world, driven partly by demographics and partly by high economic activity. Industries across the spectrum are finding it difficult to attract staff, and frequently the call is for ‘the government‘ to restrict entry into popular or so-called ’soft’ courses, and to increase the number of engineering or ICT graduates, plumbing apprenticeships or whatever.
While governments can and have restricted funding to basic community and lifestyle educational programmes, it would take a very brave government to start directing who should do what courses, at what level. Who’s going to force your son or daughter to do a course that they don’t want to enter? Last time I checked, we don’t live in a dictatorship. And in any case, government workforce planning never works, except in very small and specific short term situations.
Demographics and population aside, the real problem is that we employers haven’t done enough at an early stage in the education process to get kids excited about working in our industries. ICT and engineering have done little to attract our brightest and best. (The Telecom Xtra-ordinaries haven’t helped either). Parental and academic snobbery made learning a trade something to be seen as second-best. So we ended up with few young tradespeople, while frustrated teenagers made teachers’ lives hell, instead of leaving school at 16 to learn a trade, drive a truck or even sweep the roads.
Our tertiary education system is generally very responsive to market demand. If the kids start turning up demanding more places in a trade or technical programme, we’ll figure out a way to satisfy that demand. Right now, that demand isn’t there, and it’s up to the employers and industries of this country to stimulate it. Singapore didn’t tell its kids to do engineering - government and industry together got them excited about the opportunities and provided the places for them to learn.
Kids aren’t stupid - they just need information. It’s simple - tell people (parents , students and teachers) about your industry. Do it early (at the start of secondary school, not the end) so they don’t give up on maths and science, if you want those skills. Tell them how much a plumber makes by the time they’re 30. Tell them about the opportunities for truckies (who need a clean licence, so keep out of trouble). Tell them about the vast array of jobs you can do, places you can go and money you can earn in the IT industry. Tell them that the easiest way to get rich (boat/bach/Beamer) is to build your own business and to do that you need to learn about making/growing/designing/delivering/managing stuff, and the easiest way to do that is to start by working for a successful business. Tell them about Peter Maire, Rod Drury, Sam Morgan. Get them excited - tell them.
Here’s a recent Infotech article I wrote in a similar vein, published on 9th April 2007.
Disclosure: I’m a non-executive member of the NZ Tertiary Education Commission.
These criteria are not universally accepted and are not comprehensive, eg. graduate salaries 2 years after graduation might be a useful indicator, but is harder to compile. Despite that, the Times rankings have achieved a degree of acceptance as one useful indicator of institutional standing, and are eagerly studied by students, parents, academics and bureaucrats.
Having been in the UK for just over a fortnight, I had thought to write a short post on similarities of current issues in Britain and New Zealand. However, 
Yesterday, I introduced 
I enjoyed listening to a 
You may recall my 
Neer Korn, an Australian market researcher, propounds that businesses shouldn’t hire Gen-Y because they are untrustworthy, disloyal, cynical, blah, blah, blah. Is he serious? 
I heard an interesting