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The Skills Shortage Degrees Won't Fix
While skills shortages in areas like IT (which has its own bizarre story) make good news, Northern Ireland is experiencing another skills shortage at the minute. Apparently Newtownabbey and Belfast are suffering from a chronic shortage of tradesmen: plumbers, electricians and so on. Out of regions across the UK, Belfast had the sixth-lowest concentration of tradesmen per population (1/825) and Newtownabbey had the eight-lowest (1/804).
Meanwhile more and more young people are being encouraged to go to university to study oversubscribed shite like media studies, psychology and art.
Follow up:
I may be somewhat of a hypocrite having graduated last year, but I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the widespread attitude that a university education is something everyone should aim for. I have, in the past, mocked vocational qualifications, mainly because my experience of them is limited to the GNVQ or AVCs (Vocational A-Level) in ICT - which is a joke compared to what a GCE A-Level in Computing is/was. The year after mine, who in my school weren't given the option and had to do the GNVQ/AVCE ICT, spent their time fiddling about with Excel spreadsheets while we were studying binary arithmetic, for example.
Add to that the fact that most of those who left school to go to 'Tech' (what was then EAIFHE and is now part of the Northern Regional College) were those who didn't get the grades to get back into 6th year and vocational courses were very much seen as inferior (I don't think I'm alone in this). The thing is it's almost certainly a misconception. I'd bet if I'd left school and trained up as an electrician or a plumber I'd be earning at least as much as I am now in a decent graduate job.
In my own time-tested fashion I think I've identified a problem but am unclear as to the solution. Is it just my personal circumstances that meant I never considered keeping on "Technology" (the only class offered at school that seems to have any relevance to plumbing/electrical wiring), or are schools not encouraging enough kids into areas like this? Could encouraging kids interested in this area towards those subjects improve grades in other subjects like maths (they're going to need to count up bills and so on, after all)? Do schools even teach subjects relevant enough to the trades at present or is that something else that needs looked at?