October 29, 2007
Skills shortages get blamed for everything these days.
Having been told that the Olympics is going to be rubbish for visitors because we’ve got no decent waiters, and that the world is going to end because we haven’t got the nuclear power experts to drag us away from burning fossil fuels, we now hear skills shortages mean we are all going to die of bird flu...
Mandy Nevel, course director for the Royal Vetinary College – and leading contender for Miss Optimistic 2007 – told the Times today: “Diseases coming into this country are going to keep increasing.
“Bluetongue will come back next year and I don’t doubt that in the next couple of years we could get something else – maybe swine fever or avian influenza.
“We are inevitably going to import some of these diseases and we need people trained up before that happens.”
Nevel has persuaded the government to stump up £12,500 to fund bursaries to attract five top candidates to the college’s MSc course in controlling infectious diseases in animals.
So that is one skills gap that will be plugged. But what of the bigger picture? So many gaps remain.
Perhaps there is actually a shortage of people with the skills to end skills shortages – maybe that is the underlying problem here.
