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In part 2 of the series I looked at India and how it tries to implement a large scale operation to upgrade its educational and competitive capability. Today’s example is the United Kingdom, a developed country with steady population and the longest tradition in industry and technology in modern history.

It is the homeland of some of the greatest minds and technical feats in history. Despite the disintegration of the British empire in the 20th century, during the first post-war decades it has managed to stay in the forefront of industry and innovation. Since then however, many things have changed. The UK is no longer able to match the US and the shear manufacturing size of large rising economies like China and India.

Furthermore, ever tighter integration of the British economy with the EU and the huge size of the EU market mean that the UK does not enjoy the freedom of the past, despite political will and a decision to not adopt the euro. In the 80s, Margaret Thatcher decided to increase competition, open the country to external investment -all Japanese brands set up facilities thanks to attractive tax packages and a skilled workforce- and give extra bias to services.

Although British industry was not decimated as pessimists predicted, the UK has lost some of its momentum compared to Italy, France and Germany, despite very satisfactory overall financial performance. An area where the UK still excels is its universities and their science and engineering departments. One would say that the UK’s educational system is the closest to the North American one from all EU states. Despite this success story, the country does not benefit as much as it could, for many reasons:

• Engineering is not the high profile profession it is in France or Germany. Many efforts have been made to attract more young people to industry and technology, but a lot of the associated jobs are still seen as dirty and badly paid.
• Since the 80s, the quick success of young people in finance has led to a drain of science and engineering students towards the services sector that pays better and faster.
• The high quality university departments attract high percentages of foreign students, as UK students are less interested in technology related courses than three decades ago. Consequently, a large number of degrees has no overall positive effect, as many people go for employment back to their countries of origin.

As is continuously pointed out by engineering organisations, there is complete industrial sectors that fail to attract new blood. What this means for the longer term is that either technical personel needs to be allured from overseas -like it is already happening in the medical sector- or even better, young people must get in the loop and start contributing in the workplace.

Larger companies have less of a problem as they have more resources and experience. Medium and small businesses however try to anticipate future difficulties by reviving apprenticeship schemes. It is indeed discouraging to see complete shopfloors with very few or no young people at all. So things will have to be done the hard way, young degree holders have to be found and trained to do get experience and fill the gaps that are opening up. It is now well understood that if youngsters get interested in technology and at the same time get reasonably paid, they stick around and have no problems in making careers in technology and industry.

I believe that thanks to its experience and good understanding of the high competition environment the UK will succesfully manage to at least retain its current technological status and manufacturing capability. New technologies and the Internet are making good headways, it is primarily a matter of attracting more local students to technological university degrees, giving rewards that young people expect from hard work in the tech sectors and continuing with at least the current pace with new technology adoption.

Part 4 will be the final part of this series and will look at the use of the Internet in school education.

Link 1: ElectronRun - The link between technological education, employment and competitiveness - Part 1

Link 2: ElectronRun - The link between technological education, employment and competitiveness - Part 2 - India