UK failing it's young as gulf grows between generations

ukcarper

Sapphire wrote: »

He is always like this. I get the sense that perhaps he was adopted and didn't have the benefits of the type of grandparents and parents I had when I was growing up. I don't think I've ever come across such vicious and misinformed ramblings. It would explain a lot – and would go some way towards explaining why he writes the things he does.

I'm not sure being adopted would have had much to do with it my ex wife was adopted and her parents were a couple of the most caring people I have ever known.

Sapphire

ukcarper wrote: »

I agree but we seem to have ended up in the position where you now need a degree for a job you could have got with a few O levels. In the past the majority of companies were prepared to shoulder some of the cost of training their employees now it seems fewer are.

Agree that it's daft that people are expected to have degrees to get jobs, especially given the poor education that results from many degrees nowadays! However, in the past companies didn't need to pay for training in many cases – no one actually paid for mine. I started right at the bottom and learnt on the job, which is the best way of learning many professions. (Of course, if you want to be a doctor, scientist or lawyer, say, you need a good degree, but relatively few people go into those professions.)

Sapphire

ukcarper wrote: »

I'm not sure being adopted would have had much to do with it my ex wife was adopted and her parents were a couple of the most caring people I have ever known.

Oh, yes – I'm sure that many people's experiences have been good if they were adopted, but those of others have not been, especially if they were bought up in care homes. (In fact, I had the impression that he was raised in a care home because he mentioned care homes in an earlier rant. Not sure why I got to 'adopted' from there!)

Similarly, individuals who were mistreated by their parents may have grown up hating older people…

ukcarper

Sapphire wrote: »

Agree that it's daft that people are expected to have degrees to get jobs, especially given the poor education that results from many degrees nowadays! However, in the past companies didn't need to pay for training in many cases – no one actually paid for mine. I started right at the bottom and learnt on the job, which is the best way of learning many professions. (Of course, if you want to be a doctor, scientist or lawyer, say, you need a good degree, but relatively few people go into those professions.)

It might not be paying for the actually training but the cost is allowing experienced employees to be give up some of their time to train you and you being less productive.


I think this is quite widespread in some of the trades where work is subcontracted. A friend of mines son did a 2 year college course in carpentry after that he needed 1 year on job training to get qualification he and the majority of people on his course could not get it.

Generali

FWIW, my experience of apprentice-style working is in kitchens. Trainee chefs work 5 days a week and get a day off to attend school. While at work they are learning to cook.

Yes, a lot of that learning is in the shape of chopping onions and peeling potatoes (which teaches proper knife skills) but they will also be taught how to cook stuff in quieter moments. They will also have access to a huge wealth of knowledge in a larger kitchen and generally if you pick your moment (usually when cleaning up at the end of the night) more experienced cooks will happily share their knowledge.

Moby

ukcarper wrote: »

....... you should realise not all older people as you describe.

Except for the ones on this thread.;)

ukcarper

Moby wrote: »

Except for the ones on this thread.;)

Perhaps you should go back and read some of the post mine in particular.

Pennywise

ess0two wrote: »

I spent a week in the sales office of my employer, it taught me about customer service and the consequence of not getting products to customers.
At the time I thought what does this have to do with me as a budding chemical engineer, it taught me the consequence of plant downtime and outages and the consequence of mine and others actions.

I left school and got a job as a trainee accountant. My first few months were filing and brewing up, then I moved on to basic book-keeping, covering the reception for lunchtime and holidays, etc., and payroll. It was a year or so before I got anywhere near preparing accounts and another year before I saw tax returns. But guess what? Starting at the bottom was good for me. It let me see all aspects of the business, gave me a lot of direct client contact, and really broadened my horizons. It gave me empathy for the general admin/secretarial pool and completely avoided any "us versus them" attitude as I climbed the greasy career pole. I'm glad I did it that way rather than having 3 years at Uni and being parachuted in at a higher level!

Sapphire

ukcarper wrote: »

It might not be paying for the actually training but the cost is allowing experienced employees to be give up some of their time to train you and you being less productive.

I don't think much cost would have been incurred – more experienced employees showed me how to do various jobs bit by bit, and I helped them in their work. It really didn't involve a great deal of time on their part – and I then did the same for people who were employed after me. Although producing an entire illustrated book well is relatively complex and a skilled job (more so than now up to a few years ago), if you learn to do it gradually you just pick up things as you go along. It's not like brain surgery, or like the law, where you have to digest numerous tomes of information. The majority of jobs could be learnt actually 'on the job' without much cost to companies.

I guess the main problem nowadays is that there aren't enough decent jobs – and with globalisation there are plenty of not unintelligent people with a strong work ethic from around the world willing to do work much less expensively than would a proportion of the indigenous population of the UK. Things were simpler before globalisation, and I think employers were more paternalistic when losing employees would result in their businesses being affected, and in loss of their earnings. Now, if someone leaves a job, they are easily replaced.