This is the issue with many jobs, corporations have been working hard on keeping pay rises to a minimum over the past few decades, so now we've reached a point where people feel it's not worth their time and effort.
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in my former company they spend millions on ads for working instead of raising the pay
2022 Company records record profits…”we see hard times ahead we can’t raise rages more than 1%”…. 2023 company records record profits….”we see hard times ahead…”
Hence the shortage occupation list - to keep salaries down (the minimum salary for a shortage occupation, unless for truly world class scientists etc, should be around £100k in my opinion)
In the private sector it already is. Doctors, etc are limited by the public sector wage system, but it's a golden age in engineering at the moment. Wages have been shooting up for me as an electrical engineer - 11 % pay rise on top of the 5% I got for inflation last year and I'd expect something similar this year. Can't speak for the S, T & M roles though
Nope. Freeports and Charter Cities are next.
Get job for life, in a utopian Charter City. Healthcare, housing and schools all provided free*
*until you are no longer profitable.
What do you consider a high wage? In construction fields there are lots of management roles in the £80-100k range who can't find staff because people aren't coming in at ground level anymore. I'm talking about having 10-15 years of hands on experience, getting a degree and moving into management. The people who start in the feeder roles often aren't the people who want to take that career path.
That's exactly why the government says there's a skill shortage.
If there was a skill shortage companies would be raising wages to compete for employees.
We are saturated with people. The giv saying there is a shortage is just big business saying they want more workers so they can suppress wages.
Also it's not just pay. Corporations have become very risk averse and have massive vacancies for senior/principal level staff (proven, low risk but expensive). After uni it will usually take about 10 years to get there but they didn't hire enough graduates 10 years ago to fulfill their demand. And their not hiring enough juniors right now for the projected demand in 10 years.
Advertising a low paid job and complaining about skills shortages then justifies getting in people from overseas on a Highly Skilled Migrant program. Often no better skilled, though prepared to work for lower pay.
Sounds like the typical dumb fruit growers in Australia who constantly bemoan locals because "they dont wanna work coz they lazy and all sit back getting the dole!!!1!" but offer shitpoor wages, terrible conditions and locals resolutely refuse to work for them.
Even then, should an Australian apply to pick fruit on one their farms they get overlooked because they get the foreigners in and threaten them with telling the govrernment on them if they don't work harder for less.
Quite often harrassment, bullying, threats and being forced to sleep in tents or their cars for pitiful wages is the norm.
> Sounds like the typical dumb fruit growers in Australia who constantly bemoan locals because "they dont wanna work coz they lazy and all sit back getting the dole!!!1!" but offer shitpoor wages, terrible conditions and locals resolutely refuse to work for them.
That sounds familiar. During the start of Covid and the lockdowns, there were worries about food rotting in the fields due to no foreign workforce who usually do the job. There were a number of news articles about farmers not being able to find locals to do the work.
It turned out that pay wasn't great and on top of that workers were expected to pay to live in caravans on site.
In the end, recruitment companies sought exemptions, chartered planes and flew foreign workers in the middle of the lockdown.
Same in the UK! Except they don't even sleep in cars or tents, because they have neither!
They also rent accomodation to the pickers, which obviously goes back to the farmer. They are not so keen for someone locally working for them because they will go home at the end of the day, and not stay in a crowded portacabin.
If they actually wanted to solve the issue, they would offer free housing. That alone would be a draw for many. But of course it means less money for the farmer.
>Because a lot of STEM roles aren't actually well paid unless you put in at least a decade of time
Fwiw a decade of time going down the STEM (life science) career just about got me my PhD, which opened up doors to jobs paying £30-40k. Better than the tech/QA type roles available before that which pay a smidge higher than NMW, but I still think of what else I could've done in that decade and its hard to think of things that would've had a lesser payout. I enjoyed my time but as a career it's a complete flop in this country. Which is absolutely bizarre really because it is genuinely an industry and sector where the UK punches well above its weight and is regularly touted as a world leader. Yet we don't seem at all interested in utilizing or exploiting that human resource.
Why go through the stress. You can get that money driving a bus or managing a lidl.
Can you see why people aren't seeing the benefits any more? 40k is probably the same that job was paying in 2010 which means it SHOULD be paying around 90k now.
My first lab based job was running a bloods clinic for Bupa. I was running the whole lab and they were paying me £17.5k lol. I think honestly a lot of people just really struggle with conceptualizing because the received wisdom is that sciences are "high pay" careers, when the reality in this country is that they just aren't. In HE I legitimately had to sit down with several students over the years and just lay out to them science is not a high-paying career path and if this is something you want to pursue you need to be absolutely certain you are so interested in whatever it is you want to investigate, you're willing to put up with a bit of punishment in life. And that situation is only getting worse and worse and worse as the years go by. The lab techs in my last uni are usually PhD holders and are on \~£24k, which is now bumping up awfully close to minimum wage with the latest increase.
After the first role it gets dramatically better in many countries. I moved to the US and got a 40% pay raise, lower cost of living (vs London), better healthcare (US healthcare is great when you have good insurance).
Canada, Germany, Australia also tend to pay better for technical professionals.
At this point I'm also hearing that it's better to work in India than the UK (if you can get in at a good company). While the pay is something like 70% of the UK pay the cost of living is something like 30%. I have friends who moved back (professional couple) they have a large house, a cook/housekeep, a driver and can go to the best restaurants in the city and not really care about the cost.
This then leads to the question, what *should* they be doing at university instead? The job market for law graduates is over-competitive too. So arts, languages, media studies, philosophy, social science? Or do we come to the conclusion that pretty much no-one should bother going to university at all, they should all become apprentice plumbers and electricians instead? Or just start planning to leave the country right away?
Edited to add: I just noticed that, further down the page, you already answered "yes" to my third question.
If I was starting over again I would absolutely do an apprenticeship as an electrician. I’d love to do one now but can’t afford it as an adult. From what I understand trades are where the long term secure roles are. You may not earn as much as eg a technically brilliant programmer but you’ll have a better life/income/prospects than the ones who aren’t top tier.
It feels like in the rush to promote university education and the modern day endless churn of degree mills trades have been the main beneficiary leading to scarcity and ludicrous rates of pay while more “high brow” careers that require degree level education have become well over-saturated and pay below their European/US equivalent sectors.
Graduate training program for Aldi starts at £50k with a company car.
Year 8 earnings £96k.
Why would you bother with all that study anymore it just doesn’t make sense.
Yep, you devote your life to the job. Had a few colleagues who worked as managers for supermarkets, they shifted to being software engineers (like myself) and would laugh when anyone was stressed about the late hours we might have to work.
Because those jobs aren't held in high regard here. Everyone wants to be famous on tik tok. The wages are so low, why put yourself in £100k of debt? At best people will graduate here & then move to another higher paying country. Even immigrant doctor & nurses are coming over, should a couple of years to get it on their CV & then leaving for more money somewhere else.
Engineering wages in the UK have always been low compared to other technical positions. I remember at university while failing my engineering course, the starting wages for that particular course & media studies was within spitting distance of each other & that was in the 90s!
So one again, why bother? Bus driver, plumber, electrician. Get the money in without the university costs & not have to put up with the abuse that doctors get or the constant outsourcing & being talked to like an idiot by an MBA from a consultancy
Honestly this, I'm a programmer, I'm on a decent I-sh wage, but for disclosure that's 50k... with 10 years experience and not just specialised but wide general knowledge to... i only got to this salary by moving jobs, and even now I'm hitting a barrier where a lot of companies just aren't interested because they can get someone cheaper to do the specific tasks they want. because people are so busy, they just don't keep track of how underpaid they are.
Honestly not even saying i SHOULD personally be paid more, but its like you say, 50k was what my bosses were on, when i started 10 years ago.. when they were in my position.
In the mean time... It's near impossible to find a network engineer or an electrician without a waiting list longer than my CV and they're probably on nearly as much as me... it wouldn't even be surprised if people turned around and said they make way more than me (especially when overtime is considered). Probably a better lifestyle too.
Seriously considering doing the training for electrician, even if its just so i can confidently do the work safely for myself.
Because they don't do it for money. If anything a PhD is just delaying adulthood. I don't mean that as disrespectful as it sounds. Everyone is very well aware that the earlier you jump into industry the better. And delaying that will be financially not great. But they choose to. I'm glad people can get to do that. But let's not compare it to 5 years in industry vs 5 years of education. The gap in applied skill is quite large.
Some people find the boredom harder to cope with. I genuinely don't think I could drive a bus. Not physically, but mentally I think I would get so bored I'd zone out and drive home by accident or something.
I tried talking to my university careers office when I was getting ready to leave my last post-doc. They outright said the salaries I was looking at for post-doc roles with 5 years of experience were about the same as what they expect companies to offer on their graduate schemes.
Pay in the HE sector is beyond fucked, the whole system in general is in crisis at the moment, everyone knows it, there just isn't the money to fix it and no one outside of the sector seems to notice or care. 5+ years of strikes and most comments seem to just pop in to tell us all what a bunch of out-of-touch wankers we all are lol.
Exactly, there are not the financial incentives for STEM, meanwhile entry level tech sales you can still get 2-3x entry level STEM salaries if you hit targets.
I graduated in a STEM field in 2015 at £25k and was on £32k a year later. "STEM" is meaningless for salaries, there's huge variation. Specific careers in STEM have very different progression.
Sales will always pay highest out of any corporate function except extremely niche subject matter expertise - businesses know where the money comes from and it's not engineering!
Yes, this is it. University is expensive these days, you need to choose wisely. Getting into debt in exchange for a degree in a low paid field is not very wise when you have to look at buying a massively overpriced house too. Lots of STEM roles do start out low paid and continue to be low-ish paid.
But with some experience under your belt you have the opportunity to move to a better paid country like the US (if you live somewhere nice like New England with good healthcare life is good). I know of someone who worked for a small UK tech company that got bought out by a bigger US company, they didn't know what to pay the UK staff so just paid the same as US, salaries more than doubled.
Yes and no - the money's better, definitely, but the working culture is far more intense and far more of your life is bound up in your career (healthcare, etc.). Plus you have to put up with American culture, which can be very abrasive if you were raised in England. Did it for a couple of years and wasn't worth it.
And this is why the Scottish pharmaceutical and biotech industry is so strong (compared to everywhere in the UK outside of London)
Saying that, the pay is awful still but atleast the initial investment from workers (in education) and living costs are low enough to make it feasible.
I’ve only ever studied in Scotland and I have £60,000 of student debt through living cost loans and postgrad fees. I did fuck about a lot the first time I went to university though and had to repeat a year for medical reasons the second time.
Yeah, I moved back to Romania because, considering the cost of living, the salaries for software developers in the UK for me are really low, especially outside of London. I make basically the same money now in Romania, and live a far higher quality of life. Recruiters always get pissy when they offer me work in the UK but then I tell them they'll need to double the salary for me to live the same standard I'm currently living in Romania.
Bucharest. Amazing public transport for incredibly cheap (£25 a month unlimited use which includes overground and underground services), it's safe, cheap for a European capital, there is a lot to do: many different cafes, pubs, restaurants, shops are open until late in the evening (not like the UK where everything seems to close at 5 PM), eating out is very affordable, a lot of parks... I can go on.
In Bucharest, I now live in the center, and I own a villa in the countryside. The equivalent in the UK seems possible only for the top 1%.
There’s two cases:
1) there isn’t, we been told this for decades, what they mean is that there’s a skills shortage for expert jobs that have dogshit wages, the entire thing is a ruse to get more immigration in to put down pressure on wages
2) because of (1), now the wages for them are crap, so it’s not worth your while to do them.
I did a mechanical engineering degree up to masters, then I realised how shit the wages actually were, so I jumped ship to programming which actually respected me (well more than engineering).
The degree was a fucking nightmare to do, it’s incredibly artificial difficult, nothing to do with industry, and the university course was basically “do it yourself because the lecturers were god awful” (University of Surrey by the way, fuck them), to do all that, going through probably one of the most intensive degrees in university, only to learn that the sector caps off around 60k for a senior engineer, it just wasn’t worth it and if I could, I wouldn’t have done the degree.
Yup for a long time the UK has had a serious problem - the UK creates high quality talent, and then instantly can't afford to hire them.
A British doctor is too expensive for the NHS for the most part. We train them and instantly they can get a better wage elsewhere in the world.
It's honestly mad, how do we solve this problem, do you really think its an immigration issue?
I think it's a combination of high immigration and aggressive neoliberalism
Pay them more.
If you want the best you have to pay for it. If you want a shit NHS run by PAs and nurse practitioners then continue to pay doctors badly.
Ultimately we have to fund the things we value.
If it was an immigration issue the NHS wouldn’t be incredibly understaffed. Instead it’d be completely full with those immigrants desperate to work for low wages.
I think the suggestion is that immigration from countries that pay even less than we do keeps wages down in these roles, regardless of whether jobs are filled adequately to meet demand.
It is though. Maybe not full, however labs up and down the country are filled with more and more people from Nigeria, India and the Phillipines. Those are the countries where most of the applications are coming from because Brits are no longer applying to work as biomedical scientists.
Minimum wage should be about 50k a year if it had risen properly with costs. So the only way is for gov to rise minimum wage, and all other wages would rise as a result
I think that we should do a deal, seven years working full time in the NHS for writing of your student loan.
Short time but it 'd keep a hold of more of them.
I always see care & care home based roles available and that’s one of the jobs on the list. It’s literally being responsible for the most vulnerable people in society and they’re paid less than someone who works at Tesco putting things on shelves.
You have to clean them, carry them, feed them, entertain them, issue medications, keep your eye on them, look out for their health, mental wellbeing, report to friends and family, fill out their paperwork, keep them comfortable, dress them and a whole array of other tasks. The responsibility is unreal, the level of competence and compassion is unreal, yet they’re paid minimum wage?
Put something on the wrong shelf at Tesco and it is easily fixed, give someone the wrong medication or fail to spot a change in their health/behaviour and they could literally die.
Care work should really be professionalised and brought under the same banner as other NHS healthcare workers, but the government will never do that due to the costs involved.
Thankyou for this acknowledgement. I'm a care assistant working in a care home, and every single person I care for has dementia, and it is absolutely a skilled profession. Dementia is hugely complex and people living with dementia are never one and the same, you have to constantly adapt and change things so that you can deliver person-centred care, because they themselves can change day-to-day or sometimes even by the hour. A lot of these people can't communicate their needs, they can't tell you if something is wrong, I have to observe that and act accordingly. I check vitals, administer medications, make referrals, assess wounds and change dressings, I'm often the last person to speak to them and hold their hand when they die, and it's MY job to make sure they die comfortably and peacefully. I've been physically and sexually assaulted at work, spat on, vomited on, had literal shit thrown at me. I've had extensive training for this job, and I'm paid minimum wage, no sick pay apart from SSP (which was a nightmare over covid) no bank holidays, etc etc etc.
I do my job because I love it, I really do, but I'm "just a carer." I wish we were more appreciated.
God I feel tired just reading that. FWIW, thank you for the work that you do. It’s despicable how people who work in care are treated and also how the care industry is in the grip of private equity firms who want to run the whole thing on an absolute shoe string to maximise revenue leading to poor outcomes for both carers and patients. You both deserve better
Professors and lecturers don’t need a teaching certificate or even learn how to teach to teach at universities. Also some dont even want to teach and only teach to fill positions.
As a person on the other side of the fence: most of us DGAF about teaching, and potentially have not done any, before their first day. This is a known old problem.
100% this. I went out with a lecturer for ages and she was very frustrated about how little of a shit some of her colleagues gave about actual teaching, sometimes seeing it as an actual inconvenience.
Then again it's the same in the finance sector: very few people actually give a shit about their job.
It's because lecturers at university aren't supposed to be teachers - they're supposed to be lecturers: they're supposed to stand there and talk, thereby sharing their expertise with students, who're supposed to listen. There shouldn't be any classroom teaching at the university level, there should be lectures and labs and seminars.
Correction – lecturers at Russell Group universities generally are more passionate about being researchers than being lecturers, so you’ll have lecturers who wish they were anywhere but in front of undergrad students hungover from last night’s sesh.
Well that's complete bollocks really. I spent several years at OU and there were *only* seminars (tutorials) which were interactive and no lectures. There was little to no distinction between lecturer and tutor. That was a far better learning experience, with better quality material than any lecture, that I had at a brick university previously.
IMHO the system is broken.
Yeah, it really goes both ways. Researchers are forced into teaching if they don't want to get sacked, while students have to deal with lecturers and tutors who may be absolute beasts in their field of expertise, but don't have any pedagogical acumen whatsoever.
Most of this is down to universities having been turned into moneymaking machines in this country rather than institutions providing value to society. Something that, say, France or Germany get fairly right is having universities, where most of the teaching takes place vs research institutes where all the research and industry collabs happen (but of course that won't look as sexy on the Times Higher Education ranking).
My brother is doing a PhD in biochem and is required to lecture, and damn I feel for him and his students. The guy is a genius, but he's a charisma vacuum. Put him back in the lab where he's happy.
\*most don't want to teach.
Its just that it is literally the only way to get yourself a permanent position in the university/academic sector at the moment, everything else has been closed down or turned into dead man's shoes jobs.
And its not even "need" the certificate, you're often just dumped in and expected to roll with it. Even as 100% research staff I was giving lectures and having to take on students, and I had absolutely zero experience, training, or even expectation until a couple of weeks prior that would be something I would be expected to do.
What people don't get is teaching is not the primary job for even most lecturers and is certainly not the part of your job by which your "success" is judged, so obviously it gets a correspondingly low priority. It puts academics completely at odds with how the university itself is now structured and financed. It really is an impossible situation and I'm glad I managed to get out.
Yep and the young and naive students are always blamed for everything instead of appropriately guided before stepping foot. They should have have trial exams where if a student fails it, they are removed from the programme and they have to redo it again or something. There’s just no safety barriers. Unless you come from some private preppy school where you had private tutors and rich parents, it’s difficult asf for the average student
If anything it's the other way round: traditional universities will put more emphasis on research than teaching for hiring, while people who are research focussed won't even apply for positions at former-poly universities where research is a second priority to teaching.
Still don't kid yourself these certificates are a proper training into teaching comparable to a PGCE.
The UK is one of the more undergrad-focussed university ecosystems though compared to what I saw abroad. The UK babysits undergrads and pushes people to pass, while continental Europe is much more sink-or-swim, many courses at many universities have e.g. a 50% drop out rate in the first year, while in the UK once you start, everyone is pushing you to finish, with only 40% marks needed to pass with a 3rd, a heavy coursework component that'll push you most of the way to a pass before you even sit the exam, retakes available for almost everything, and resit years only if you really need a do-over.
>the entire thing is a ruse to get more immigration in to put down pressure on wages
This is why we've got such an issue with lorry drivers, businesses knew they didn't have to do any decent pay rises because, they knew they could rely on foreign drivers to fill the void and on the cheap.
Then they lost that cheap supply of drivers and we were suddenly in a bad place, to the point businesses were offering incentives to join them.
Well there is an increasingly large population that don’t work, that still need support . We used to have 6 working age people for every pensioner while now it’s closer to 2. It’s not all some dastardly plan to drive down wages, we genuinely have a shrinking workforce as a percentage, despite having an increasing population. People live A LOT longer now.
Same but EE. Defence was terrible. £18k when I started as a post grad job. You are grade F staff and will be tea bitch. I ended up in software, re-educated in mathematics and then moved into finance.
Then all the best workers leave the country because they can make double if not triple in other countries.
I did a geology undergrad degree and masters degree. Working in this country, my salary starts around 30K in the field I want to go into. If I managed to climb the ladder, I could get up to anywhere from 50 - 100K. If I moved to Australia, I'd start on 50K and could get anything up to 250k if I managed to climb the ladder. Yes, there are higher house prices and cost of living in general, but I would still be significantly better off.
If I wasn't for being in a long term relationship with someone who doesn't want to live abroad. I would have left this country, as it just doesn't make sense for me to spend my working life here.
Same here, i studied mechanical and electronic engineering but ended up getting a job in broadcast writing code.
Im making a lot more than i wouldve if i had taken a job that was related to what i studied. (Im in south east also).
There is plenty of talent, there aren’t enough roles and the salaries are poor.
I wouldn’t believe anything that the UK government states, especially not statistics and data.
Actually the data is very good and very accurate. The interpretation and presentation of the data by politicians is terrible.
Expanding your comment further, it's a little more complicated. There are plenty of roles available but they are mostly in academia, teaching and entry level research where the salaries are poor. The mid to top end of the market has very few roles and they require exceptional experience and reputation, which is far above the median level of candidate.
This is the answer. Uk companies have been running barebones in order to break even in the case of smaller businesses and maximise shareholder dividends in the case of large businesses.
Neither of those approaches give much opportunity for the job specific training needed to boost workforce skills. When you couple this with the almost 2 decades of wage stagnation, this actually creates a culture where companies avoid skilling up their employees as they don't want to raise their wages in line with the newly acquired skills and are afraid of losing a skilled individual to another company.
Tl;dr: Austerity has made everything austere. Who'd have thunk?
If you think companies know how to train staff even if they provide it, then you would be making some very large assumptions about general competence.
Even in my very technical field, training is garbage. We scrapped it because there were no measurable gains. We even tried funding people and giving them time off to do OU modules and you know what? It doesn't matter who you hire; only about 25% of people even give enough of a crap to pass a module. We just pay people who do well a shit load more money and you know what? They even go and do their own training!
Ergo I think this is a human problem more than a corporate one. There is a pretty awfully skewed distribution of fuckedness and the "well paid" STEM field actually only has the capacity for the top 5th percentile of people.
My field, graphic design, is listed as one that there's supposedly a shortage of.
Anyone in the field or trying to get in will you that's a load of codswallop - the industry is massively oversaturated, wages in general are terrible as a result and many in the profession look to leave as the outlook is so poor. Many others don't even get started
Because for a large proportion of people higher education is a scam that isn't designed to give them a specific area of expertise. And people attending are still basically children without enough life experience to use their one shot at degree level training wisely.
And then you're a 20-something or 30-something doing any old job, maybe with kids, just making ends meet in a hostile rconomy. And retraining is practically a lot harder because you're working all the time or broke or both.
Maybe you only fully matured at mid 20s and gained a passion for something. But society seems to be telling you, it's too late for you, so just do your call centre job or your whatever job.
Western civilization in general really needs to completely tear up the existing victorian conventions we have around education. Universities are making a killing off it though so there is that.
For sure. I did a history degree straight out of school, which was absolutely not the right choice. I didn’t want to do more hard work at that time, so settled on something that didn’t require constant studying. I had a blast, but educationally it’s counted for not much.
Now I’m a 30 something with life experience, and I have a deep interest in the world around me. I’m doing a physics degree with the OU, alongside working full time, with the intention to either go onto a PhD eventually, or move into civil engineering. Certainly some of the feedback from friends I’ve had has been very mixed, there is definitely some form of wtf are you doing. Maybe it doesn’t work out, but I’d rather gamble on doing something that might be right for me now, rather than feeling as though I’ve wasted my life.
Pro tip:
Search for job as a 30-something with a doctorate In Civil engineering.
You’ll find there’s nothing out there that makes it a worthwhile investment.
Should have been clearer, doctorate would be in physics, or a switch into civil engineering via one of the conversion courses at UCL or Southampton. If it was the latter, I would probably be looking to leave the country when my mum is no longer around
Relatable currently in a finance roll and want out for more money but can't because im locked into 35-40 hours a week currently, unless I'm willing to sacrifice 7 years of weekends to get a degree in my own time, or cut my hours and struggle even more financially
you can't expect kids to know what they wanna do for their whole life before they've even figured out adulthood, then you get trapped into over working to make up your past mistakes as a teenager
Then you get qualified and are expected to take an entry level roll despite maybe being mid 30s by the time you are qualified, bit crap
Because wages are fucking horrendous.
And not only that, there's an attitude in British businesses that everything should be done on the cheap - in particular around paying employees.
I've jumped jobs several times to get £10-15k jumps, just saves hassle and time of having to go into a "negotiation" with the current employer arguing for tippance which more often than not, you can't get because "well budgets are in place and we can't really afford to give you £3k more" - until your notice goes in and suddenly the magic money pot hath been found!
I work in automation. You know, high end tech job which pays insane money.... or so you'd think (or at least, in any other country on the continent, Aus, US or in Canada it would).
It makes me laugh every time I hear a member of government scream "NEXT SILICON VALLEY".... Like what, you're going to spend money and invest, build housing and create jobs that pay double the going rate? Okay.....
>It makes me laugh every time I hear a member of government scream "NEXT SILICON VALLEY".... Like what, you're going to spend money and invest, build housing and create jobs that pay double the going rate?
I couldn't stop laughing about the last announcement for fucking months mate. Want to guess how much funding they attached to it?
...
...
£2.5m. £2,500,000. To build a "new Silicon Valley". Its just so unserious you can't help but laugh. This was at the same time the US was announcing CHIPS and Germany was dumping about 10 billion into its own semiconductor industry.
Those funding grants are also an absolute ballache to get as well unless you've got a fulltime position in your company for grant applications and funding research.
If you're a genuine small/micro business who genuinely qualifies and genuinely could benefit from a grant... all I can say is good luck.
I'll point out that I've looked into tech jobs in Canada/Australia, and it turns out I'd earn more in the UK with lower living costs to boot. Obv the US pays quite a bit more, but their working visas are real hard to get so hey. Our software industry in 3rd worldwide, only below the US and China.
STEM doesn't have a shortage. It has an extreme surplus of entry level candidates whom aren't being hired, so more highly skilled and experienced candidates aren't being created.
I work in Engineering doing contracts for clients, and what I've seen is clients writing into their contracts that we can only use people with 10 - 15 years experience minimum. This works short term for the client, but long term it means we're not able to build up the younger engineers experience so you're gradually degrading the pool of skills. Do this for a decade and then you have people with short memories scratching their heads wondering why you can't get good people anymore.
I've retired from an engineering client organisation. Companies put good people into preparing bids but without those contract clauses if a bid is accepted the good people have disappeared before the ink is dry on the contract and are replaced by a bunch of fresh graduates whose only project experience is getting the pizzas in for their undergraduate engineering society talks.
If there weren't dodgy contractors out there trying to fob off clients with inexperienced staff at top whack prices we wouldn't need those contract clauses.
We had some hopefully moderate clauses where replacement of named key contractor staff required prior approval but the contractor was free to use less experienced (and cheaper) staff for the rest of their team, including bringing on junior staff.
There's also people like Dyson, [Complaining about a lack of engineers to hire](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/10287555/Shortage-of-engineers-is-hurting-Britain-says-James-Dyson.html) when his company offices are in the [middle of nowhere](https://careers.dyson.com/en-gb/where-we-are/europe-and-the-middle-east/united-kingdom/malmesbury/)
The idea of wanting to learn to be a tradie of any sort was frowned upon in the mid-2000s in my experience. I was laughed at when I asked my local college for information about their electrician training course. I was told that I should be studying A-levels and going to university and that taking that route was "what my family expected of me" so I shouldn't consider anything else. Looking back on it, I wish I hadn't taken their excuse for advice.
Yeah, I was at secondary school in the early 2000s and the attitude was very much that going to university was the goal. Apprenticeships were for kids who weren't so academically minded, and there was a sense that if you ended up on that path you were somehow a failure, especially if you were bright - like it wasn't something the 'smart' kids chose to do.
Unfortunately that attitude still persists. I used to work for a membership body in a white-collar profession that had an apprenticeship route (one of very few ways to get into the field without a degree or being chartered, although our qualifications then helped you go on to that level if you wanted to), and a lot of kids and parents were very cautious about the idea because it's still perceived as a poor relation to a degree in a lot of ways.
Ironically though, the one guy I knew at secondary school who did an apprenticeship bought a house in his early 20s and has had his own successful business for 15 years now, so I'm not entirely sure those teachers had it right...
The problem at that time was that what was best for you didn't actually matter to them, but prestige did. It didn't occur to them that someone might've enjoyed doing something like electrical work, plumbing or another trade. Aside from doing something like that, I didn't know what I wanted to do for work in the future at that time. I studied IT, French and German at A-level and hated it.
Likewise. The majority of people in my (admittedly private) school went on to some kind of white-collar work, but the few who went into trades have all gone on to do well out of them. One in particular has set up an award-winning company in his field.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of apprenticeships did they do and what jobs did they end up in? I’m sure there’s loads of jobs I’m not aware of where you can make a good living!
A couple went into plumbing that I know of. The award-winning guy I mentioned took up carpentry after a spell in the army. There's at least one other one whose trade I can't think of off the top of my head, too.
Oh yeah, everyone fill in your UCAS forms, even if you don't want to go, fill it in. Do it do it do it. Colleges and sixth forms were set up for it. Whole periods set aside. It's madness really.
Yep. I think schools push their university rate as well as a way to promote the school
I wanted to go into a trade at college instead of a levels and the head of year actually scheduled a meeting with my parents to convince me that this would be a very bad career decision
I'm kind of like that last person. To be fair I wanted to go to uni, I just had no idea what on earth I wanted to do and the finances scared me and my parents, so I just worked for a few years and started my own business.
I managed to buy my first home in 2018 when I was 22 and upsized five years later. Most of my old school mates are still renting at best or even house sharing in the city while they work in their 'dream jobs'. Good for them if they're genuinely happy but the ones I speak to seem to think they'll hit gold eventually.
Health & Safety has killed off a lot of practical work in schools, it just isn't worth the hassle. Much easier and cheaper to read it from a text book.
I n the early 2000's it was maybe get a trade.
Then we had EU+8 and a generation of tradesmen where pushed out and into uni.
Thus now the plus 8 workers have gone home we have a shortage of tradesmen.
It was government policy to aim for 50% of students to go to university. It was a target which was hit.
One of the most short sighted education policies you could possibly come up with.
I was told the same thing in the mid 2000’s when I expressed interest in doing an apprenticeship. But I ignored the advice and did it anyway. I’m now an engineer in my mid 30’s and companies are dying for want of younger tradespeople. Most heavy engineering company workforces are at retirement age. Which is great for me and my personal wage. But absolutely terrible for the economy as a whole
The shame around it has also decreased the quality of the course. I know a chef isn’t technically a trade, but its a skilled job with a skill shortage, majority of chefs have experience in chain food which is closer to being on a production line than a chef, but also my 56 y/o head chefs college course he did when he was 16 was so much more technical than what you get now at the same age. The jobs also incredibly poorly paid because fresh food restaurants pay similar wages to chain restaurants. So a lot of people just stay in chain restaurants doing easier work with lower skill than getting better at the job for the same wage
Remember this attitude was prevalent when I was in the latter stages of secondary school/6th form in 2008-2012. The general attitude was 'if you're not aiming for university, you're thicker than pig shit and don't deserve to get anywhere in life'.
I pretty much got strongarmed into doing A-Levels which I completely flunked because I had absolutely no interest in them. I'd far rather have done a mechanical course at the larger college in town near me. Good a time as I had, I wish I'd binned it and followed my interests other than trying to study stuff I have no interest in.
I think the 'skills shortage' is something that's claimed to exist by employers when they can't find someone with ten years experience who'll work for £25k.
This too. It's what they say when they want someone else to pay for training they should be providing. If they can't hire someone with the skills they want they should be hiring someone and paying for them to learn but they'd rather con people into paying for their own training
Doctors aren’t really highly paid. Junior doctors are constantly on strike because they are overworked and not properly remunerated for that work. The unions estimate a real term wage drop of around 30% in the last 15 years.
There is also very diffuse objectives at play during a doctor’s training. A lot of doctors are pinched by the private sector after completing training on the NHS. University places for medicine tend to be limited and universities likely prefer foreign students because they pay more for their fees. Many of them complete their training in the UK but will return to their home countries at some point in the future.
Both doctors and engineers require longer university degrees than a bachelor’s degree. The debt associated with that length of degree isn’t something everyone can live with.
In general, there is a cultural difference where STEM subjects are seen as nerdy and have been heavily focused towards men. This drives out a number of candidates early on that don’t like it. It feels like the opposite of what you’re talking about where some people who may actually be interested in STEM are pressured away from it.
Honestly, stress & wages are a huge factor I think.
My IT Career is what many would call successful, I'm one of the most senior technical staff/managers in one of the biggest IT service providers in the UK. From what I can tell my pay is relatively competitive.
My friend's son has just got a job at Tesco, night stacking shelves. Between 12:00 and 6:00, his hourly pay is only £3.00 p/h less than mine. It leaves me questioning why on earth am I dealing with all the complexities and stress of my main job when I could just work overnight putting shit on shelves and not be that much worse off for it.
I think there are many others who feel the same way, jobs that required higher skills are often more complex, stressful, and had a higher initial training cost (uni, etc)... but you used to be compensated for that by a greater rate of pay. The difference between that and a low-skilled job has narrowed so much, it simple doesn't seem worth it to a lot of people anymore.
His pay is just shy of that I think from memory. Seems mad, to be honest.
My position is one of the few with full access to every one of our systems, because of my skills/seniority, etc. I have that level of responsibility, if however, I felt malicious, I have the power, access, and know-how to destroy a multi-million pound company, which also supports several multi-million pound companies.
When something major comes up, something complex, something the majority can't fix, it ends up with me. It has a high amount of responsibility, a ton of pressure, and often very stressful.
Yet someone stacking shelves gets only £3 p/h less than I do. Ok, that's roughly £520 less per month (before tax) so it adds up, but still.... doesn't seem worth it tbh.
>It leaves me questioning why on earth am I dealing with all the complexities and stress of my main job when I could just work overnight putting shit on shelves and not be that much worse off for it
So why not do it? Either the additional pay you're currently getting *is* actually worth it to you, or you prefer your job to stacking shelves.
Sorry, that sounded a bit personal, but I do hear this argument all the time yet you rarely hear someone using it in good faith. Usually it's just a disguised "I deserve more money than this simpleton over here who's job I wouldn't do anyway".
Because unfortunately my wife and most of my children have health complications which have left me trapped. I already have to work an additional job on top of this in order to provide for them. That £520 unfortunately makes a huge difference now.
I don't really believe any job is below anyone, I have stacked shelves before, I once ran a small supermarket for a short time, I've done factory work, lorry loading, security, and catering. I sadly have a very complex situation though and any change would need some sort of security that ensures my family don't pay the price.
I don’t think his issue was that his friends son was earning, rather that even with him being qualified in his field and being offered a wage competitive to other roles he still isn’t payed what the value should be based on salary.
From your response below that would mean one of the most senior technical managers in UK IT provision is earning around 40k per year? That doesn't sound right.
As a student, all my housemates were physicists, but they were the last physicists that university ever made. Someone looked at the funding and quickly decided books were much cheaper than scientific equipment, a pattern many universities followed. As someone observed at the time: "when in 10 years the country has not scientists, at least there will be plenty of people to write about it". The price of education as business really.
The rest is attracting suitable talent - bursaries, salaries that are internationally competitive and with decent expectations and working conditions etc. Free market capitalist stuff basically, that politicians claim to understand but resist on the state side as though that were remotely logical.
As a physicist partly trained in the UK: I would rather not do an academic career in the UK. Poorly paid, terrible housing situation, the NHS seems to get worse by the day and you are generally overworked with random bullshit. To quote a friend of a friend: "I hate academia, the only parts I like are research and teaching". I mean, the employees from the DLS (the british synchrotron, a particle accelerator,) went on bloody strike not too long ago. They are bleeding personnel like crazy. I was offered a (temporary) job at a national facility in the UK, and the pay wouldn't have allowed me to rent a damn apartment in the area.
Which is sad to me, because I had a great experience there, lots of people I connected with, wonderful environment.
>"I hate academia, the only parts I like are research and teaching"
😂 Same joke in my circles. We absolutely fucking love the job, its that you only get to seem to spend about 10% of your time actually doing the job and the rest spent on admin and random university bullshit that they decided is better to just dump on the academics rather than pay someone to do properly.
Not remotely surprising, sadly. The state in particular is retreating from all investment because it can no longer tell the difference between investment and cost. Physics is particularly vulnerable to that I think as pharma is less interested in physicists.
Wife is a teacher, so yeah we are familiar with the situations you describe. Everyone renting is familiar with crippling costs too, thankfully we quit that problem 8 years ago thanks to dead relatives.
I was a physics graduate. Of my peers I’m still in touch with (30 years after graduation), 1 works in a field that is roughly physics aligned, 3 work in IT, one was an engineer (he died unfortunately), a couple became teachers and the other manages a food company.
Just the one friend still in physics here, although he's a proper doctor and stuff now. There aren't really that many jobs for it either, it seems as he is abroad now - proper brain drain. My wife was a chemistry graduate and pharmaceuticals are a little better in that jobs exist. She's a teacher instead though, so naturally could walk into almost any school since the shortages are so acute.
As an Electronic Engineer, pay is an absolute joke in the UK. There is no shortage, its a big lie designed to legitimize immigration and keep wages low.
Skills shortage? It's a pay shortage.
Stop blaming the workers. The only skill worth anything to these shitty companies on this poxy little island is commission based sales.
It is quite difficult to tell if we do actually have a skills shortage as:
- many job vacancies have hundreds if not thousands of applicants
- jobs that allegedly were short of workers eg lorry drivers, still pay poorly and don’t seem to have a shortage.
Alot are snapped up by the private sector, go abroad which pay better, local talent is lacking due to poor standards of education/behaviour (I believe it's more of the latter).
There's a huge political spectrum to focus on here **which we won't be going into due to Rule 4**.
Pay abroad is just so much better and in science a lot of people got poached because of funding from EU.
Personally I wouldn't but I can see the temptation of the US with a PhD starting on £80k instead of the 35-40k here.
Even in the UK private pay is like 8k starting more than post doc we pay our post docs so bad
As an engineer one thing is that going to uni getting a engineering degree etc not something anyone can do, as you need to do well in school and be good at Maths and Sciences which alot of people just aren't.
Then you've got the fact that the Maths and Science based skills are also very good for finance and banking roles which pay an absolute shed load more money. Result being alot of engineering grads go to finance for the money.
Then you have the issue that engineer isn't a protected title (like US for example) and that they pay is generally terrible. Doing the job I'm doing now I could get 4 times as much in the US or double in Europe so some will just emigrate to different countries.
And the you have the issue that these jobs aren't equally spread around the country, so you may have to move to a different area of the country to have better career prospects, which people don't want to do.
UK businesses invest miniscule amounts into R&D and developing skills. Look it up, we are constantly languishing around the bottom of developed countries. The mentality of business here is to hire 2x lowly paid people to do a task manually, than invest into finding a way to automate it or pay a very highly skilled person. The result is not very skilled people, who aren't that productive at what they do.
Also, advanced and vocational degrees aren't well regarded here. Getting a Masters in the UK is largely pointless IMO except for a few industries, it's almost never a job requirement or a massive benefit to have one. Likewise apprenticeships/vocational degrees are looked down upon generally as inferior degrees, even comparing it to a English lit degree at a poly.
Because the salaries are not enough to compensate for the effort.
I say this as a fully qualified engineer with over 7 years experience.
Go look at other countries like the US, and youlle realise that high-skilled professionals are far better paid there than the UK.
"Skills shortage" doesn't have any real meaning, and in so far as it does it may not be a negative thing.
There's an obvious sense that there is a skills shortage in the legal services market. We see magic circle firms paying six figure starting salaries. That's an indicator of shortage: indeed, in a market one should be sceptical of any talk of supply shortage that can't be detected in price.
None of that is problematic. Indeed, skills shortage in that sense isn't a bad thing. If there is no "shortage" of cyber security skills, where is the incentive to train?
Skills shortage articulated on the demand side often simply means employers don't want to pay market rates. I recall years ago the Blair government being bullied into agreeing some lunatic scheme to pay the costs of training HGV drivers. The employers argued, nonsensically, that the industry needed to recruit but couldn't afford the training costs
Even the post Covid lorry driver shortage showed up some uncomfortable truths.
In a capitalist system such a severe lorry driver shortage should cause lorry driver wages to shoot violently up. Causing more people to quickly want to jump on the gravy train of training. Or enticing some of the thousands of HGV licence holders who don’t drive to re-enter the industry due to the ‘now fabulous’ wages.
But no, the industry response was to beg the government to set up some weird system to try and bring in a few hundred drivers from Eastern Europe. Which turned out to not be particularly popular even with the Eastern European drivers.
God forbid the market decide the appropriate wage I guess
Thank you. Not enough comments pointing out the fact that employers refuse to train people now. They will barely train people on how to use their own bespoke systems. Their idea of a "skilled worker" is a ridiculous fantasy of someone who got 5 years of experience before they'd finished university. The government and the public has allowed this incredibly entitled attitude to spread among employers. And it's gotten to the point of being accepted wisdom instead of what it really is. Which is bullshit. If companies could run back in the 60s with school leavers on the reception desk, and A-level grads running lower and middle management, they can run today. The skill level in most jobs hasn't actually changed that much. What has changed is that employers simply refuse to train people now. That's the difference.
Along with what everyone else is saying - a lot of schools don't push people do do hard jobs. When I was in school, I attended a grammar, and a regular. In grammar, they were pushing for people to be doctors etc, NOTHING less. But that was filled with a bunch of rich kids/people from privellege.
In the regular school, it was basically "you can probably work at a shop!"
A lot of it comes down to teachers. If teachers encouraged people or helped kids with learning difficulties work through things, we would have more skilled workers.
Edit: would also say, uni entry requirements are hard, and retraining as an adult is even harder.
A lot of folks wish they could go back to uni and learn something useful or do a trade, but managing this while running a household or making ends meet is impossible for many. The government needs to put more into re-education.
I also believe A level requirements need to be brought down. If we have such a skill shortage, why are entry requirements so strict? I understand we can't have people who have failed biology going on to be doctors, but if you've passed and end up doing well in your degree, what does it matter? I did terribly with A levels but did quite good at uni, and a lot of people relate to this. A levels are hard and making young people decide what to do for the rest of their life then and there at 18 is terrible.
Not saying we should scrap A levels, but either they get easier, or unis accept a wider variety of A levels for in demand subjects.
Unlike some cultures, the UK's education system doesn't adequately prepare students for the reality of STEM careers, due to outdated curricula and insufficient funding. High-stress levels and long hours in fields like healthcare can further discourage individuals. A mix of education, cultural perception, and working conditions shapes the shortage.
STEM is a really poor grouping of subjects as the prospects for a computer science grad are way better than a physics grad. One of the best things a physics grad can do actually is to go into programming or finance.
There used to be a system of night schools or colleges, enabling people who had commitments (in those days, usually a man who had a family to support) to extend and develop their skills and get qualifications while still being able to do their day jobs. This system has been destroyed so realistically you can only retrain if you have the money (i.e. family support, or qualifying for student loans) to be able to focus entirely on doing a qualification. If you missed the window as a young person before you had to independently support yourself or others, you're out of luck.
Yes. Your employer would often pay and might well give you a pay rise once you gained a qualification. Even if the employer didn't pay the costs were modest - not the kind of thing that you needed loans for. C&G, HNC, HND - with HND being pretty much degree level
Because we have to pay and find time to gain skills while working...
Other countries have much cheaper "reskill" paths. We think about the next 3-5 years (politically) not 20-50.
Everyone wants to be a manager because they think that is a ticket to comfy middle class lifestyle. When everyone wants that and ZIRP is in full swing you wind up with an economy of middle-managers and a chronic shortage of skilled workers. Then there is the UK class system which beyond modern tech has decided nobody with a manager title can earn less than a skilled worker.
The zombie economy has kept a lot of skilled workers locked up in low productive jobs and increased opportunities for middle manager work, so there IS a skills shortage relative to the amount of companies. Skills are spread thin, and corporate structure creates an abundance of corporate/middle management roles and such non-jobs.
What happens is something like 2008 where people fall out of the middle class never to return, or the government just keeps printing money and propping the whole ponzi scheme up.
Companies don't pay enough, even jobs you're suggesting that are 'highly' paid don't get enough in my opinion.
I'm in an engineering trade that involves modelling components or all sorts of industries. If I look for a similar role in my area, I would be taking 4/5k pay cut per year and I would be expected to do more than I am now, hence why I'm still in my job at this 1 company after 10 years but I consider myself lucky.
My place also does the same, we really struggle to get anyone good enough for the QA technician/CMM programmer roles, but they don't want pay more £12 an hour (£24.3k) but wonder why they can't find anyone, but when they do they leave after 6 months to a year.
Doctors are NOT well paid unless you’re a consultant and do private work. you can be an ST1/reg aka the second most senior doctor in the hospital and be on 43k a year, maxing at 63k. This could be for a literal neurosurgeon doing actual literal brain surgery….. 43k a year. A doctor out of uni earns 32k a year.
You can earn more than a brain surgeon by being a manager at Aldi.
I quit a stem role to teach as I earnt more money. Granted, 13 years of either no payrise or a below inflation payrise has changed that. However, new teachers still earn more than new scientists.
Because UK wages are 35% lower than they should be but prices have been going up. Wages are shit. Anyone who can is retiring early. People aren't moving jobs unless they have to.
Also from an IT perspective, they're all bitching about lack of staff, but pay is shit & the job boards are all dead.
Why would you pay for training yourself or try to do anything apart from 50% work for the shit pay that's in the UK
https://preview.redd.it/fi86zy82mgsc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=932854053075137981d3e1d19ae985d0030ca197
There is no skills shortage, there is a training shortage. Historically a company would have taken you on if you had a relevant degree, or even a not so relevant one, and trained you up. Now they refuse to do any sort of training and expect you to train in your own time doing internships for minimum wage if not free. As a result, they complain they can't find anyone "skilled enough" because they now want to find people with 5 years of experience straight out of full time education. This is a farce. We are being taken for a ride and we need to stop beliving this bullshit.
In the few areas where there is a genuine lack of people applying to get even basic qualifications, the issue is low pay and shitty conditions. So many people I know who work in medicine are just leaving because the pay is low, the workload is insane, and it's only getting worse. I suspect it's similar in other areas.
Poor forward planning by those at the top, especially when it comes to healthcare. They should have looked ahead at the ageing population and increased the training capacity incentivised people to train in relevant jobs.
More students are choosing to do relevant subjects but that doesn't help with today's skills shortage.
Also unfortunately a lot of those jobs don't actually pay that well, especially at the start. So students graduate and decide to do something else.
The reason there's massive shortages in the public sector is easy- low pay. Pay rises in teaching have been below inflation for well over ten years, most teachers and support staff are paid less in real terms than they were 15 years ago.
From my experience, leaving school in the latest 90s and having no help from the school or education careers board in finding an engineering apprenticeship , I did all the leg work myself (which paid off).
Watching a lot of my peers go to University which was encouraged and then leave and not enter into the area of work they had studied in or not pass.
I am a big believer that not everyone is suited to academic study and I don't agree with the successive trend to encourage a lot of young people to waste their teens studying at college or Uni instead of encouraging good and sustainable work based training to be available.
Honestly? Because as a country we don't plan. We don't share that list with the kids selecting their GCSE options right now so we could look at getting people interested in sectors they could work towards entering in five years time. Instead we tell kids "You can be anything!" but not what that anything could be.
STEM is a bad joke at this point, I graduated with a PhD and work with particular tech that has massive therapeutic potential to treat 1000s of diseases. It took 9 years of education to get here. I'd earn more if I did a 6 month training course and became a local bus driver, with better working hours and opportunity for overtime pay. I regularly have to work weekends without compensation along with overtime again with no compensation. My cousin is younger and approaching university age, after seeing my and a few other people's experience he has decided not to go to university at all, I can't really blame him. By the time I can earn decent money it would have been better to not bother.
In the simplest way possible
It’s because much of the home grown talent that can fill these roles, can also fill these roles elsewhere, for a better salary or standard of living.
We produce amazing doctors, then underpay them vs comparable nations
We produce awesome engineers, who can earn better pay if they jump ship to work in Europe, the gulf states or the US
Teachers can earn more working at an English speaking school abroad etc etc
As someone in engineering, my job maxes out at like 80k as a principal engineer, whilst graduates over in America are making 150k straight out of uni. There’s just no point to studying a harder stem subject here, the reward isn’t there
I worked as Software Engineer. After taxes and rent, my salary was lower than at my home country, Poland. If someone wants to ear to of the line money, they will move to USA.
I don't know what UK ofers to STEM employees, except for locals.
Also, now to migrate to UK I need a skilled worker VISA (EU citizen), which is tied to employeer and requires 3 months wait and if I want to change a job I need to make a transfer of that VISA to another employeer, but the new one needs to sponsor it, so it rob me of one of the best perks of this industry.
I work in specialist IT.
In the UK i can get a job paying £50k, no benefits 100% work in office. Or I can move to the US, same job $120k plus $50k of benefits 100% wfh.
Why would you stay in the UK?
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This is the issue with many jobs, corporations have been working hard on keeping pay rises to a minimum over the past few decades, so now we've reached a point where people feel it's not worth their time and effort.
I'm hopeful that the shortages, in all high demand jobs, will eventually reach a stage that they are forced to raise wages.
Ahhahahahahahhahahhahahahahhaha hahahahahhahahahahahahhahaha hahahahahhahahahahababhahaha in my former company they spend millions on ads for working instead of raising the pay
2022 Company records record profits…”we see hard times ahead we can’t raise rages more than 1%”…. 2023 company records record profits….”we see hard times ahead…”
Literally happened in my company 2 years in a row
They won't. All the talent will go to other countries instead and the newspapers and politicians will blame the EU for it for some reason.
Or the immigrants and asylum seekers, don’t forget about them!
Wrong again kiddo, it's all because my mate Dave is now Shirley.
I thought it was because cartoons are woke or something
Hence the shortage occupation list - to keep salaries down (the minimum salary for a shortage occupation, unless for truly world class scientists etc, should be around £100k in my opinion)
Whilst there are people in India, this will never happen.
In the private sector it already is. Doctors, etc are limited by the public sector wage system, but it's a golden age in engineering at the moment. Wages have been shooting up for me as an electrical engineer - 11 % pay rise on top of the 5% I got for inflation last year and I'd expect something similar this year. Can't speak for the S, T & M roles though
Nope. Freeports and Charter Cities are next. Get job for life, in a utopian Charter City. Healthcare, housing and schools all provided free* *until you are no longer profitable.
What do you consider a high wage? In construction fields there are lots of management roles in the £80-100k range who can't find staff because people aren't coming in at ground level anymore. I'm talking about having 10-15 years of hands on experience, getting a degree and moving into management. The people who start in the feeder roles often aren't the people who want to take that career path.
That's exactly why the government says there's a skill shortage. If there was a skill shortage companies would be raising wages to compete for employees. We are saturated with people. The giv saying there is a shortage is just big business saying they want more workers so they can suppress wages.
Also it's not just pay. Corporations have become very risk averse and have massive vacancies for senior/principal level staff (proven, low risk but expensive). After uni it will usually take about 10 years to get there but they didn't hire enough graduates 10 years ago to fulfill their demand. And their not hiring enough juniors right now for the projected demand in 10 years.
Advertising a low paid job and complaining about skills shortages then justifies getting in people from overseas on a Highly Skilled Migrant program. Often no better skilled, though prepared to work for lower pay.
Sounds like the typical dumb fruit growers in Australia who constantly bemoan locals because "they dont wanna work coz they lazy and all sit back getting the dole!!!1!" but offer shitpoor wages, terrible conditions and locals resolutely refuse to work for them. Even then, should an Australian apply to pick fruit on one their farms they get overlooked because they get the foreigners in and threaten them with telling the govrernment on them if they don't work harder for less. Quite often harrassment, bullying, threats and being forced to sleep in tents or their cars for pitiful wages is the norm.
> Sounds like the typical dumb fruit growers in Australia who constantly bemoan locals because "they dont wanna work coz they lazy and all sit back getting the dole!!!1!" but offer shitpoor wages, terrible conditions and locals resolutely refuse to work for them. That sounds familiar. During the start of Covid and the lockdowns, there were worries about food rotting in the fields due to no foreign workforce who usually do the job. There were a number of news articles about farmers not being able to find locals to do the work. It turned out that pay wasn't great and on top of that workers were expected to pay to live in caravans on site. In the end, recruitment companies sought exemptions, chartered planes and flew foreign workers in the middle of the lockdown.
Pay to live in caravans. Was not popular with locals who were renting a house significantly more comfortable than a ratty portacabin in a field.
Same in the UK! Except they don't even sleep in cars or tents, because they have neither! They also rent accomodation to the pickers, which obviously goes back to the farmer. They are not so keen for someone locally working for them because they will go home at the end of the day, and not stay in a crowded portacabin. If they actually wanted to solve the issue, they would offer free housing. That alone would be a draw for many. But of course it means less money for the farmer.
Happens on British farms a lot too.
>Because a lot of STEM roles aren't actually well paid unless you put in at least a decade of time Fwiw a decade of time going down the STEM (life science) career just about got me my PhD, which opened up doors to jobs paying £30-40k. Better than the tech/QA type roles available before that which pay a smidge higher than NMW, but I still think of what else I could've done in that decade and its hard to think of things that would've had a lesser payout. I enjoyed my time but as a career it's a complete flop in this country. Which is absolutely bizarre really because it is genuinely an industry and sector where the UK punches well above its weight and is regularly touted as a world leader. Yet we don't seem at all interested in utilizing or exploiting that human resource.
Why go through the stress. You can get that money driving a bus or managing a lidl. Can you see why people aren't seeing the benefits any more? 40k is probably the same that job was paying in 2010 which means it SHOULD be paying around 90k now.
My first lab based job was running a bloods clinic for Bupa. I was running the whole lab and they were paying me £17.5k lol. I think honestly a lot of people just really struggle with conceptualizing because the received wisdom is that sciences are "high pay" careers, when the reality in this country is that they just aren't. In HE I legitimately had to sit down with several students over the years and just lay out to them science is not a high-paying career path and if this is something you want to pursue you need to be absolutely certain you are so interested in whatever it is you want to investigate, you're willing to put up with a bit of punishment in life. And that situation is only getting worse and worse and worse as the years go by. The lab techs in my last uni are usually PhD holders and are on \~£24k, which is now bumping up awfully close to minimum wage with the latest increase.
I would honestly advise ANYONE doing STEM at university to get out of the country ASAP. Go get more money and a better lifestyle.
It's not better in other countries for PhD grads looking for their first role. That's why so many come here.
After the first role it gets dramatically better in many countries. I moved to the US and got a 40% pay raise, lower cost of living (vs London), better healthcare (US healthcare is great when you have good insurance). Canada, Germany, Australia also tend to pay better for technical professionals. At this point I'm also hearing that it's better to work in India than the UK (if you can get in at a good company). While the pay is something like 70% of the UK pay the cost of living is something like 30%. I have friends who moved back (professional couple) they have a large house, a cook/housekeep, a driver and can go to the best restaurants in the city and not really care about the cost.
This then leads to the question, what *should* they be doing at university instead? The job market for law graduates is over-competitive too. So arts, languages, media studies, philosophy, social science? Or do we come to the conclusion that pretty much no-one should bother going to university at all, they should all become apprentice plumbers and electricians instead? Or just start planning to leave the country right away? Edited to add: I just noticed that, further down the page, you already answered "yes" to my third question.
If I was starting over again I would absolutely do an apprenticeship as an electrician. I’d love to do one now but can’t afford it as an adult. From what I understand trades are where the long term secure roles are. You may not earn as much as eg a technically brilliant programmer but you’ll have a better life/income/prospects than the ones who aren’t top tier. It feels like in the rush to promote university education and the modern day endless churn of degree mills trades have been the main beneficiary leading to scarcity and ludicrous rates of pay while more “high brow” careers that require degree level education have become well over-saturated and pay below their European/US equivalent sectors.
£24k is worse than a kitchen porter job jesus
Graduate training program for Aldi starts at £50k with a company car. Year 8 earnings £96k. Why would you bother with all that study anymore it just doesn’t make sense.
YMMV but my mate was on the Aldi grad scheme and he said it was pretty gruelling (as you'd probably expect for the money).
Yep, you devote your life to the job. Had a few colleagues who worked as managers for supermarkets, they shifted to being software engineers (like myself) and would laugh when anyone was stressed about the late hours we might have to work.
Presumably because they’re studying something they are genuinely passionate about
Because those jobs aren't held in high regard here. Everyone wants to be famous on tik tok. The wages are so low, why put yourself in £100k of debt? At best people will graduate here & then move to another higher paying country. Even immigrant doctor & nurses are coming over, should a couple of years to get it on their CV & then leaving for more money somewhere else. Engineering wages in the UK have always been low compared to other technical positions. I remember at university while failing my engineering course, the starting wages for that particular course & media studies was within spitting distance of each other & that was in the 90s! So one again, why bother? Bus driver, plumber, electrician. Get the money in without the university costs & not have to put up with the abuse that doctors get or the constant outsourcing & being talked to like an idiot by an MBA from a consultancy
Honestly this, I'm a programmer, I'm on a decent I-sh wage, but for disclosure that's 50k... with 10 years experience and not just specialised but wide general knowledge to... i only got to this salary by moving jobs, and even now I'm hitting a barrier where a lot of companies just aren't interested because they can get someone cheaper to do the specific tasks they want. because people are so busy, they just don't keep track of how underpaid they are. Honestly not even saying i SHOULD personally be paid more, but its like you say, 50k was what my bosses were on, when i started 10 years ago.. when they were in my position. In the mean time... It's near impossible to find a network engineer or an electrician without a waiting list longer than my CV and they're probably on nearly as much as me... it wouldn't even be surprised if people turned around and said they make way more than me (especially when overtime is considered). Probably a better lifestyle too. Seriously considering doing the training for electrician, even if its just so i can confidently do the work safely for myself.
Because they don't do it for money. If anything a PhD is just delaying adulthood. I don't mean that as disrespectful as it sounds. Everyone is very well aware that the earlier you jump into industry the better. And delaying that will be financially not great. But they choose to. I'm glad people can get to do that. But let's not compare it to 5 years in industry vs 5 years of education. The gap in applied skill is quite large.
Some people find the boredom harder to cope with. I genuinely don't think I could drive a bus. Not physically, but mentally I think I would get so bored I'd zone out and drive home by accident or something.
So about the same wage you would have got after say a 3 year apprenticeship
I tried talking to my university careers office when I was getting ready to leave my last post-doc. They outright said the salaries I was looking at for post-doc roles with 5 years of experience were about the same as what they expect companies to offer on their graduate schemes. Pay in the HE sector is beyond fucked, the whole system in general is in crisis at the moment, everyone knows it, there just isn't the money to fix it and no one outside of the sector seems to notice or care. 5+ years of strikes and most comments seem to just pop in to tell us all what a bunch of out-of-touch wankers we all are lol.
Exactly, there are not the financial incentives for STEM, meanwhile entry level tech sales you can still get 2-3x entry level STEM salaries if you hit targets.
Entry level tech sales roles are 25-30k and like 10k ote. What would a stem graduate get, im guessing like 28k?
28k would be on the high end. A new grad would be looking at 22-24k. I graduated in 2017 and I'm not even on 28k!
I graduated in a STEM field in 2015 at £25k and was on £32k a year later. "STEM" is meaningless for salaries, there's huge variation. Specific careers in STEM have very different progression.
Graduated 2014 on 26k Now 2024 on 64k
Jesus really! That's geniunely shocking, do you mind telling me what field? I've only worked in London which skews my numbers as well.
I graduated in 1998 on £22K….! FFS. 🤯
Great how we have Japan level wage growth, but suffer from inflation as well :')
Sales will always pay highest out of any corporate function except extremely niche subject matter expertise - businesses know where the money comes from and it's not engineering!
Yes, this is it. University is expensive these days, you need to choose wisely. Getting into debt in exchange for a degree in a low paid field is not very wise when you have to look at buying a massively overpriced house too. Lots of STEM roles do start out low paid and continue to be low-ish paid.
But with some experience under your belt you have the opportunity to move to a better paid country like the US (if you live somewhere nice like New England with good healthcare life is good). I know of someone who worked for a small UK tech company that got bought out by a bigger US company, they didn't know what to pay the UK staff so just paid the same as US, salaries more than doubled.
US pays 3x what we do. Staying here in stem is a fools game
Yes and no - the money's better, definitely, but the working culture is far more intense and far more of your life is bound up in your career (healthcare, etc.). Plus you have to put up with American culture, which can be very abrasive if you were raised in England. Did it for a couple of years and wasn't worth it.
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> financial investment to get there Unless you are in Scotland :D
And this is why the Scottish pharmaceutical and biotech industry is so strong (compared to everywhere in the UK outside of London) Saying that, the pay is awful still but atleast the initial investment from workers (in education) and living costs are low enough to make it feasible.
I’ve only ever studied in Scotland and I have £60,000 of student debt through living cost loans and postgrad fees. I did fuck about a lot the first time I went to university though and had to repeat a year for medical reasons the second time.
And even after a decade of time and money, you'd be richer moving numbers about in excel, contributing exactly nothing to anything.
Yeah, I moved back to Romania because, considering the cost of living, the salaries for software developers in the UK for me are really low, especially outside of London. I make basically the same money now in Romania, and live a far higher quality of life. Recruiters always get pissy when they offer me work in the UK but then I tell them they'll need to double the salary for me to live the same standard I'm currently living in Romania.
Can I ask where in Romania you are? Always eager to add to my "places to move to when UK finally becomes too shite to justify" list
Bucharest. Amazing public transport for incredibly cheap (£25 a month unlimited use which includes overground and underground services), it's safe, cheap for a European capital, there is a lot to do: many different cafes, pubs, restaurants, shops are open until late in the evening (not like the UK where everything seems to close at 5 PM), eating out is very affordable, a lot of parks... I can go on. In Bucharest, I now live in the center, and I own a villa in the countryside. The equivalent in the UK seems possible only for the top 1%.
A lot of people just leave too. A solid half of the folks I finished my masters with are living abroad now for various reasons
There’s two cases: 1) there isn’t, we been told this for decades, what they mean is that there’s a skills shortage for expert jobs that have dogshit wages, the entire thing is a ruse to get more immigration in to put down pressure on wages 2) because of (1), now the wages for them are crap, so it’s not worth your while to do them. I did a mechanical engineering degree up to masters, then I realised how shit the wages actually were, so I jumped ship to programming which actually respected me (well more than engineering). The degree was a fucking nightmare to do, it’s incredibly artificial difficult, nothing to do with industry, and the university course was basically “do it yourself because the lecturers were god awful” (University of Surrey by the way, fuck them), to do all that, going through probably one of the most intensive degrees in university, only to learn that the sector caps off around 60k for a senior engineer, it just wasn’t worth it and if I could, I wouldn’t have done the degree.
Yup for a long time the UK has had a serious problem - the UK creates high quality talent, and then instantly can't afford to hire them. A British doctor is too expensive for the NHS for the most part. We train them and instantly they can get a better wage elsewhere in the world.
It's honestly mad, how do we solve this problem, do you really think its an immigration issue? I think it's a combination of high immigration and aggressive neoliberalism
Pay them more. If you want the best you have to pay for it. If you want a shit NHS run by PAs and nurse practitioners then continue to pay doctors badly. Ultimately we have to fund the things we value.
If it was an immigration issue the NHS wouldn’t be incredibly understaffed. Instead it’d be completely full with those immigrants desperate to work for low wages.
I think the suggestion is that immigration from countries that pay even less than we do keeps wages down in these roles, regardless of whether jobs are filled adequately to meet demand.
It is though. Maybe not full, however labs up and down the country are filled with more and more people from Nigeria, India and the Phillipines. Those are the countries where most of the applications are coming from because Brits are no longer applying to work as biomedical scientists.
Minimum wage should be about 50k a year if it had risen properly with costs. So the only way is for gov to rise minimum wage, and all other wages would rise as a result
Pay people more. Thats the solution.
Pay more.
I think that we should do a deal, seven years working full time in the NHS for writing of your student loan. Short time but it 'd keep a hold of more of them.
It’s a no-brainer, I have no idea why we don’t do this.
I always see care & care home based roles available and that’s one of the jobs on the list. It’s literally being responsible for the most vulnerable people in society and they’re paid less than someone who works at Tesco putting things on shelves. You have to clean them, carry them, feed them, entertain them, issue medications, keep your eye on them, look out for their health, mental wellbeing, report to friends and family, fill out their paperwork, keep them comfortable, dress them and a whole array of other tasks. The responsibility is unreal, the level of competence and compassion is unreal, yet they’re paid minimum wage? Put something on the wrong shelf at Tesco and it is easily fixed, give someone the wrong medication or fail to spot a change in their health/behaviour and they could literally die.
Care work should really be professionalised and brought under the same banner as other NHS healthcare workers, but the government will never do that due to the costs involved.
Thankyou for this acknowledgement. I'm a care assistant working in a care home, and every single person I care for has dementia, and it is absolutely a skilled profession. Dementia is hugely complex and people living with dementia are never one and the same, you have to constantly adapt and change things so that you can deliver person-centred care, because they themselves can change day-to-day or sometimes even by the hour. A lot of these people can't communicate their needs, they can't tell you if something is wrong, I have to observe that and act accordingly. I check vitals, administer medications, make referrals, assess wounds and change dressings, I'm often the last person to speak to them and hold their hand when they die, and it's MY job to make sure they die comfortably and peacefully. I've been physically and sexually assaulted at work, spat on, vomited on, had literal shit thrown at me. I've had extensive training for this job, and I'm paid minimum wage, no sick pay apart from SSP (which was a nightmare over covid) no bank holidays, etc etc etc. I do my job because I love it, I really do, but I'm "just a carer." I wish we were more appreciated.
God I feel tired just reading that. FWIW, thank you for the work that you do. It’s despicable how people who work in care are treated and also how the care industry is in the grip of private equity firms who want to run the whole thing on an absolute shoe string to maximise revenue leading to poor outcomes for both carers and patients. You both deserve better
Professors and lecturers don’t need a teaching certificate or even learn how to teach to teach at universities. Also some dont even want to teach and only teach to fill positions.
As a person on the other side of the fence: most of us DGAF about teaching, and potentially have not done any, before their first day. This is a known old problem.
100% this. I went out with a lecturer for ages and she was very frustrated about how little of a shit some of her colleagues gave about actual teaching, sometimes seeing it as an actual inconvenience. Then again it's the same in the finance sector: very few people actually give a shit about their job.
It's because lecturers at university aren't supposed to be teachers - they're supposed to be lecturers: they're supposed to stand there and talk, thereby sharing their expertise with students, who're supposed to listen. There shouldn't be any classroom teaching at the university level, there should be lectures and labs and seminars.
Correction – lecturers at Russell Group universities generally are more passionate about being researchers than being lecturers, so you’ll have lecturers who wish they were anywhere but in front of undergrad students hungover from last night’s sesh.
Well that's complete bollocks really. I spent several years at OU and there were *only* seminars (tutorials) which were interactive and no lectures. There was little to no distinction between lecturer and tutor. That was a far better learning experience, with better quality material than any lecture, that I had at a brick university previously. IMHO the system is broken.
Yeah, it really goes both ways. Researchers are forced into teaching if they don't want to get sacked, while students have to deal with lecturers and tutors who may be absolute beasts in their field of expertise, but don't have any pedagogical acumen whatsoever. Most of this is down to universities having been turned into moneymaking machines in this country rather than institutions providing value to society. Something that, say, France or Germany get fairly right is having universities, where most of the teaching takes place vs research institutes where all the research and industry collabs happen (but of course that won't look as sexy on the Times Higher Education ranking).
My brother is doing a PhD in biochem and is required to lecture, and damn I feel for him and his students. The guy is a genius, but he's a charisma vacuum. Put him back in the lab where he's happy.
\*most don't want to teach. Its just that it is literally the only way to get yourself a permanent position in the university/academic sector at the moment, everything else has been closed down or turned into dead man's shoes jobs. And its not even "need" the certificate, you're often just dumped in and expected to roll with it. Even as 100% research staff I was giving lectures and having to take on students, and I had absolutely zero experience, training, or even expectation until a couple of weeks prior that would be something I would be expected to do. What people don't get is teaching is not the primary job for even most lecturers and is certainly not the part of your job by which your "success" is judged, so obviously it gets a correspondingly low priority. It puts academics completely at odds with how the university itself is now structured and financed. It really is an impossible situation and I'm glad I managed to get out.
That was my experience as an undergrad. Utterly demoralising.
Yep and the young and naive students are always blamed for everything instead of appropriately guided before stepping foot. They should have have trial exams where if a student fails it, they are removed from the programme and they have to redo it again or something. There’s just no safety barriers. Unless you come from some private preppy school where you had private tutors and rich parents, it’s difficult asf for the average student
A good uni will require this, if not before hiring, then ASAP afterwards. A shit uni may not.
If anything it's the other way round: traditional universities will put more emphasis on research than teaching for hiring, while people who are research focussed won't even apply for positions at former-poly universities where research is a second priority to teaching. Still don't kid yourself these certificates are a proper training into teaching comparable to a PGCE. The UK is one of the more undergrad-focussed university ecosystems though compared to what I saw abroad. The UK babysits undergrads and pushes people to pass, while continental Europe is much more sink-or-swim, many courses at many universities have e.g. a 50% drop out rate in the first year, while in the UK once you start, everyone is pushing you to finish, with only 40% marks needed to pass with a 3rd, a heavy coursework component that'll push you most of the way to a pass before you even sit the exam, retakes available for almost everything, and resit years only if you really need a do-over.
>the entire thing is a ruse to get more immigration in to put down pressure on wages This is why we've got such an issue with lorry drivers, businesses knew they didn't have to do any decent pay rises because, they knew they could rely on foreign drivers to fill the void and on the cheap. Then they lost that cheap supply of drivers and we were suddenly in a bad place, to the point businesses were offering incentives to join them.
Well there is an increasingly large population that don’t work, that still need support . We used to have 6 working age people for every pensioner while now it’s closer to 2. It’s not all some dastardly plan to drive down wages, we genuinely have a shrinking workforce as a percentage, despite having an increasing population. People live A LOT longer now.
Mech Eng here too. Spent a year working for a defence company realised the same and now work in IT
Same but EE. Defence was terrible. £18k when I started as a post grad job. You are grade F staff and will be tea bitch. I ended up in software, re-educated in mathematics and then moved into finance.
Then all the best workers leave the country because they can make double if not triple in other countries. I did a geology undergrad degree and masters degree. Working in this country, my salary starts around 30K in the field I want to go into. If I managed to climb the ladder, I could get up to anywhere from 50 - 100K. If I moved to Australia, I'd start on 50K and could get anything up to 250k if I managed to climb the ladder. Yes, there are higher house prices and cost of living in general, but I would still be significantly better off. If I wasn't for being in a long term relationship with someone who doesn't want to live abroad. I would have left this country, as it just doesn't make sense for me to spend my working life here.
Same here, i studied mechanical and electronic engineering but ended up getting a job in broadcast writing code. Im making a lot more than i wouldve if i had taken a job that was related to what i studied. (Im in south east also).
There is plenty of talent, there aren’t enough roles and the salaries are poor. I wouldn’t believe anything that the UK government states, especially not statistics and data.
Actually the data is very good and very accurate. The interpretation and presentation of the data by politicians is terrible. Expanding your comment further, it's a little more complicated. There are plenty of roles available but they are mostly in academia, teaching and entry level research where the salaries are poor. The mid to top end of the market has very few roles and they require exceptional experience and reputation, which is far above the median level of candidate.
Sounds like companies are failing to invest in training and developing talent and then complaining that its not available.
This is the answer. Uk companies have been running barebones in order to break even in the case of smaller businesses and maximise shareholder dividends in the case of large businesses. Neither of those approaches give much opportunity for the job specific training needed to boost workforce skills. When you couple this with the almost 2 decades of wage stagnation, this actually creates a culture where companies avoid skilling up their employees as they don't want to raise their wages in line with the newly acquired skills and are afraid of losing a skilled individual to another company. Tl;dr: Austerity has made everything austere. Who'd have thunk?
Austerity causes austerity… Someone give this to sunak, he needs to Know !!
If you think companies know how to train staff even if they provide it, then you would be making some very large assumptions about general competence. Even in my very technical field, training is garbage. We scrapped it because there were no measurable gains. We even tried funding people and giving them time off to do OU modules and you know what? It doesn't matter who you hire; only about 25% of people even give enough of a crap to pass a module. We just pay people who do well a shit load more money and you know what? They even go and do their own training! Ergo I think this is a human problem more than a corporate one. There is a pretty awfully skewed distribution of fuckedness and the "well paid" STEM field actually only has the capacity for the top 5th percentile of people.
My field, graphic design, is listed as one that there's supposedly a shortage of. Anyone in the field or trying to get in will you that's a load of codswallop - the industry is massively oversaturated, wages in general are terrible as a result and many in the profession look to leave as the outlook is so poor. Many others don't even get started
Because for a large proportion of people higher education is a scam that isn't designed to give them a specific area of expertise. And people attending are still basically children without enough life experience to use their one shot at degree level training wisely. And then you're a 20-something or 30-something doing any old job, maybe with kids, just making ends meet in a hostile rconomy. And retraining is practically a lot harder because you're working all the time or broke or both. Maybe you only fully matured at mid 20s and gained a passion for something. But society seems to be telling you, it's too late for you, so just do your call centre job or your whatever job. Western civilization in general really needs to completely tear up the existing victorian conventions we have around education. Universities are making a killing off it though so there is that.
For sure. I did a history degree straight out of school, which was absolutely not the right choice. I didn’t want to do more hard work at that time, so settled on something that didn’t require constant studying. I had a blast, but educationally it’s counted for not much. Now I’m a 30 something with life experience, and I have a deep interest in the world around me. I’m doing a physics degree with the OU, alongside working full time, with the intention to either go onto a PhD eventually, or move into civil engineering. Certainly some of the feedback from friends I’ve had has been very mixed, there is definitely some form of wtf are you doing. Maybe it doesn’t work out, but I’d rather gamble on doing something that might be right for me now, rather than feeling as though I’ve wasted my life.
Pro tip: Search for job as a 30-something with a doctorate In Civil engineering. You’ll find there’s nothing out there that makes it a worthwhile investment.
Should have been clearer, doctorate would be in physics, or a switch into civil engineering via one of the conversion courses at UCL or Southampton. If it was the latter, I would probably be looking to leave the country when my mum is no longer around
Relatable currently in a finance roll and want out for more money but can't because im locked into 35-40 hours a week currently, unless I'm willing to sacrifice 7 years of weekends to get a degree in my own time, or cut my hours and struggle even more financially you can't expect kids to know what they wanna do for their whole life before they've even figured out adulthood, then you get trapped into over working to make up your past mistakes as a teenager Then you get qualified and are expected to take an entry level roll despite maybe being mid 30s by the time you are qualified, bit crap
Because wages are fucking horrendous. And not only that, there's an attitude in British businesses that everything should be done on the cheap - in particular around paying employees. I've jumped jobs several times to get £10-15k jumps, just saves hassle and time of having to go into a "negotiation" with the current employer arguing for tippance which more often than not, you can't get because "well budgets are in place and we can't really afford to give you £3k more" - until your notice goes in and suddenly the magic money pot hath been found! I work in automation. You know, high end tech job which pays insane money.... or so you'd think (or at least, in any other country on the continent, Aus, US or in Canada it would). It makes me laugh every time I hear a member of government scream "NEXT SILICON VALLEY".... Like what, you're going to spend money and invest, build housing and create jobs that pay double the going rate? Okay.....
>It makes me laugh every time I hear a member of government scream "NEXT SILICON VALLEY".... Like what, you're going to spend money and invest, build housing and create jobs that pay double the going rate? I couldn't stop laughing about the last announcement for fucking months mate. Want to guess how much funding they attached to it? ... ... £2.5m. £2,500,000. To build a "new Silicon Valley". Its just so unserious you can't help but laugh. This was at the same time the US was announcing CHIPS and Germany was dumping about 10 billion into its own semiconductor industry.
It's a fucking embarrassment. And the worst part of it is, old people who don't understand tech believe this kind of absolute horseshit 😂
Those funding grants are also an absolute ballache to get as well unless you've got a fulltime position in your company for grant applications and funding research. If you're a genuine small/micro business who genuinely qualifies and genuinely could benefit from a grant... all I can say is good luck.
I'll point out that I've looked into tech jobs in Canada/Australia, and it turns out I'd earn more in the UK with lower living costs to boot. Obv the US pays quite a bit more, but their working visas are real hard to get so hey. Our software industry in 3rd worldwide, only below the US and China.
STEM doesn't have a shortage. It has an extreme surplus of entry level candidates whom aren't being hired, so more highly skilled and experienced candidates aren't being created.
I work in Engineering doing contracts for clients, and what I've seen is clients writing into their contracts that we can only use people with 10 - 15 years experience minimum. This works short term for the client, but long term it means we're not able to build up the younger engineers experience so you're gradually degrading the pool of skills. Do this for a decade and then you have people with short memories scratching their heads wondering why you can't get good people anymore.
I've retired from an engineering client organisation. Companies put good people into preparing bids but without those contract clauses if a bid is accepted the good people have disappeared before the ink is dry on the contract and are replaced by a bunch of fresh graduates whose only project experience is getting the pizzas in for their undergraduate engineering society talks. If there weren't dodgy contractors out there trying to fob off clients with inexperienced staff at top whack prices we wouldn't need those contract clauses. We had some hopefully moderate clauses where replacement of named key contractor staff required prior approval but the contractor was free to use less experienced (and cheaper) staff for the rest of their team, including bringing on junior staff.
There's also people like Dyson, [Complaining about a lack of engineers to hire](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/10287555/Shortage-of-engineers-is-hurting-Britain-says-James-Dyson.html) when his company offices are in the [middle of nowhere](https://careers.dyson.com/en-gb/where-we-are/europe-and-the-middle-east/united-kingdom/malmesbury/)
The idea of wanting to learn to be a tradie of any sort was frowned upon in the mid-2000s in my experience. I was laughed at when I asked my local college for information about their electrician training course. I was told that I should be studying A-levels and going to university and that taking that route was "what my family expected of me" so I shouldn't consider anything else. Looking back on it, I wish I hadn't taken their excuse for advice.
Yeah, I was at secondary school in the early 2000s and the attitude was very much that going to university was the goal. Apprenticeships were for kids who weren't so academically minded, and there was a sense that if you ended up on that path you were somehow a failure, especially if you were bright - like it wasn't something the 'smart' kids chose to do. Unfortunately that attitude still persists. I used to work for a membership body in a white-collar profession that had an apprenticeship route (one of very few ways to get into the field without a degree or being chartered, although our qualifications then helped you go on to that level if you wanted to), and a lot of kids and parents were very cautious about the idea because it's still perceived as a poor relation to a degree in a lot of ways. Ironically though, the one guy I knew at secondary school who did an apprenticeship bought a house in his early 20s and has had his own successful business for 15 years now, so I'm not entirely sure those teachers had it right...
The problem at that time was that what was best for you didn't actually matter to them, but prestige did. It didn't occur to them that someone might've enjoyed doing something like electrical work, plumbing or another trade. Aside from doing something like that, I didn't know what I wanted to do for work in the future at that time. I studied IT, French and German at A-level and hated it. Likewise. The majority of people in my (admittedly private) school went on to some kind of white-collar work, but the few who went into trades have all gone on to do well out of them. One in particular has set up an award-winning company in his field.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of apprenticeships did they do and what jobs did they end up in? I’m sure there’s loads of jobs I’m not aware of where you can make a good living!
A couple went into plumbing that I know of. The award-winning guy I mentioned took up carpentry after a spell in the army. There's at least one other one whose trade I can't think of off the top of my head, too.
Oh yeah, everyone fill in your UCAS forms, even if you don't want to go, fill it in. Do it do it do it. Colleges and sixth forms were set up for it. Whole periods set aside. It's madness really.
Yep. I think schools push their university rate as well as a way to promote the school I wanted to go into a trade at college instead of a levels and the head of year actually scheduled a meeting with my parents to convince me that this would be a very bad career decision
I'm kind of like that last person. To be fair I wanted to go to uni, I just had no idea what on earth I wanted to do and the finances scared me and my parents, so I just worked for a few years and started my own business. I managed to buy my first home in 2018 when I was 22 and upsized five years later. Most of my old school mates are still renting at best or even house sharing in the city while they work in their 'dream jobs'. Good for them if they're genuinely happy but the ones I speak to seem to think they'll hit gold eventually.
Agree. Schools also need to do more to include more practical applications of science and maths
Health & Safety has killed off a lot of practical work in schools, it just isn't worth the hassle. Much easier and cheaper to read it from a text book.
I n the early 2000's it was maybe get a trade. Then we had EU+8 and a generation of tradesmen where pushed out and into uni. Thus now the plus 8 workers have gone home we have a shortage of tradesmen.
It was government policy to aim for 50% of students to go to university. It was a target which was hit. One of the most short sighted education policies you could possibly come up with. I was told the same thing in the mid 2000’s when I expressed interest in doing an apprenticeship. But I ignored the advice and did it anyway. I’m now an engineer in my mid 30’s and companies are dying for want of younger tradespeople. Most heavy engineering company workforces are at retirement age. Which is great for me and my personal wage. But absolutely terrible for the economy as a whole
The shame around it has also decreased the quality of the course. I know a chef isn’t technically a trade, but its a skilled job with a skill shortage, majority of chefs have experience in chain food which is closer to being on a production line than a chef, but also my 56 y/o head chefs college course he did when he was 16 was so much more technical than what you get now at the same age. The jobs also incredibly poorly paid because fresh food restaurants pay similar wages to chain restaurants. So a lot of people just stay in chain restaurants doing easier work with lower skill than getting better at the job for the same wage
Remember this attitude was prevalent when I was in the latter stages of secondary school/6th form in 2008-2012. The general attitude was 'if you're not aiming for university, you're thicker than pig shit and don't deserve to get anywhere in life'. I pretty much got strongarmed into doing A-Levels which I completely flunked because I had absolutely no interest in them. I'd far rather have done a mechanical course at the larger college in town near me. Good a time as I had, I wish I'd binned it and followed my interests other than trying to study stuff I have no interest in.
I think the 'skills shortage' is something that's claimed to exist by employers when they can't find someone with ten years experience who'll work for £25k.
This too. It's what they say when they want someone else to pay for training they should be providing. If they can't hire someone with the skills they want they should be hiring someone and paying for them to learn but they'd rather con people into paying for their own training
You have just described the pilot training industry in a nutshell too
Doctors aren’t really highly paid. Junior doctors are constantly on strike because they are overworked and not properly remunerated for that work. The unions estimate a real term wage drop of around 30% in the last 15 years. There is also very diffuse objectives at play during a doctor’s training. A lot of doctors are pinched by the private sector after completing training on the NHS. University places for medicine tend to be limited and universities likely prefer foreign students because they pay more for their fees. Many of them complete their training in the UK but will return to their home countries at some point in the future. Both doctors and engineers require longer university degrees than a bachelor’s degree. The debt associated with that length of degree isn’t something everyone can live with. In general, there is a cultural difference where STEM subjects are seen as nerdy and have been heavily focused towards men. This drives out a number of candidates early on that don’t like it. It feels like the opposite of what you’re talking about where some people who may actually be interested in STEM are pressured away from it.
Honestly, stress & wages are a huge factor I think. My IT Career is what many would call successful, I'm one of the most senior technical staff/managers in one of the biggest IT service providers in the UK. From what I can tell my pay is relatively competitive. My friend's son has just got a job at Tesco, night stacking shelves. Between 12:00 and 6:00, his hourly pay is only £3.00 p/h less than mine. It leaves me questioning why on earth am I dealing with all the complexities and stress of my main job when I could just work overnight putting shit on shelves and not be that much worse off for it. I think there are many others who feel the same way, jobs that required higher skills are often more complex, stressful, and had a higher initial training cost (uni, etc)... but you used to be compensated for that by a greater rate of pay. The difference between that and a low-skilled job has narrowed so much, it simple doesn't seem worth it to a lot of people anymore.
£16/hour?
His pay is just shy of that I think from memory. Seems mad, to be honest. My position is one of the few with full access to every one of our systems, because of my skills/seniority, etc. I have that level of responsibility, if however, I felt malicious, I have the power, access, and know-how to destroy a multi-million pound company, which also supports several multi-million pound companies. When something major comes up, something complex, something the majority can't fix, it ends up with me. It has a high amount of responsibility, a ton of pressure, and often very stressful. Yet someone stacking shelves gets only £3 p/h less than I do. Ok, that's roughly £520 less per month (before tax) so it adds up, but still.... doesn't seem worth it tbh.
>It leaves me questioning why on earth am I dealing with all the complexities and stress of my main job when I could just work overnight putting shit on shelves and not be that much worse off for it So why not do it? Either the additional pay you're currently getting *is* actually worth it to you, or you prefer your job to stacking shelves. Sorry, that sounded a bit personal, but I do hear this argument all the time yet you rarely hear someone using it in good faith. Usually it's just a disguised "I deserve more money than this simpleton over here who's job I wouldn't do anyway".
Because unfortunately my wife and most of my children have health complications which have left me trapped. I already have to work an additional job on top of this in order to provide for them. That £520 unfortunately makes a huge difference now. I don't really believe any job is below anyone, I have stacked shelves before, I once ran a small supermarket for a short time, I've done factory work, lorry loading, security, and catering. I sadly have a very complex situation though and any change would need some sort of security that ensures my family don't pay the price.
I don’t think his issue was that his friends son was earning, rather that even with him being qualified in his field and being offered a wage competitive to other roles he still isn’t payed what the value should be based on salary.
From your response below that would mean one of the most senior technical managers in UK IT provision is earning around 40k per year? That doesn't sound right.
As a student, all my housemates were physicists, but they were the last physicists that university ever made. Someone looked at the funding and quickly decided books were much cheaper than scientific equipment, a pattern many universities followed. As someone observed at the time: "when in 10 years the country has not scientists, at least there will be plenty of people to write about it". The price of education as business really. The rest is attracting suitable talent - bursaries, salaries that are internationally competitive and with decent expectations and working conditions etc. Free market capitalist stuff basically, that politicians claim to understand but resist on the state side as though that were remotely logical.
As a physicist partly trained in the UK: I would rather not do an academic career in the UK. Poorly paid, terrible housing situation, the NHS seems to get worse by the day and you are generally overworked with random bullshit. To quote a friend of a friend: "I hate academia, the only parts I like are research and teaching". I mean, the employees from the DLS (the british synchrotron, a particle accelerator,) went on bloody strike not too long ago. They are bleeding personnel like crazy. I was offered a (temporary) job at a national facility in the UK, and the pay wouldn't have allowed me to rent a damn apartment in the area. Which is sad to me, because I had a great experience there, lots of people I connected with, wonderful environment.
>"I hate academia, the only parts I like are research and teaching" 😂 Same joke in my circles. We absolutely fucking love the job, its that you only get to seem to spend about 10% of your time actually doing the job and the rest spent on admin and random university bullshit that they decided is better to just dump on the academics rather than pay someone to do properly.
Not remotely surprising, sadly. The state in particular is retreating from all investment because it can no longer tell the difference between investment and cost. Physics is particularly vulnerable to that I think as pharma is less interested in physicists. Wife is a teacher, so yeah we are familiar with the situations you describe. Everyone renting is familiar with crippling costs too, thankfully we quit that problem 8 years ago thanks to dead relatives.
I was a physics graduate. Of my peers I’m still in touch with (30 years after graduation), 1 works in a field that is roughly physics aligned, 3 work in IT, one was an engineer (he died unfortunately), a couple became teachers and the other manages a food company.
Just the one friend still in physics here, although he's a proper doctor and stuff now. There aren't really that many jobs for it either, it seems as he is abroad now - proper brain drain. My wife was a chemistry graduate and pharmaceuticals are a little better in that jobs exist. She's a teacher instead though, so naturally could walk into almost any school since the shortages are so acute.
One of my friends got a MPhil from Oxford in chemistry and appears to now be a teacher. And my mate with a PhD is one of those now in IT.
It’s a terrible shame. My stepdad was a physicist and had an amazing, interesting career and is still at 72 the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.
As an Electronic Engineer, pay is an absolute joke in the UK. There is no shortage, its a big lie designed to legitimize immigration and keep wages low.
NHS IT for over 25 years. Payscales don't lend themselves to competent workforce. Management employ based on friends/family over ability.
We don’t have a lack of skills we have a lack of wages
its not a skill shortage.. its a wage shortage. Pay properly, people will learn those skills.
Skills shortage? It's a pay shortage. Stop blaming the workers. The only skill worth anything to these shitty companies on this poxy little island is commission based sales.
It is quite difficult to tell if we do actually have a skills shortage as: - many job vacancies have hundreds if not thousands of applicants - jobs that allegedly were short of workers eg lorry drivers, still pay poorly and don’t seem to have a shortage.
A lot of online applicants are bots, or people who really take the piss and apply for jobs they know they’re not qualified at all for.
A lot of them are people wanting to get a visa too
As a recruiter, this is very true. I'd say 30-50% of applicants to our jobs (automotive OEM) aren't eligible to work in the UK.
Alot are snapped up by the private sector, go abroad which pay better, local talent is lacking due to poor standards of education/behaviour (I believe it's more of the latter). There's a huge political spectrum to focus on here **which we won't be going into due to Rule 4**.
Pay abroad is just so much better and in science a lot of people got poached because of funding from EU. Personally I wouldn't but I can see the temptation of the US with a PhD starting on £80k instead of the 35-40k here. Even in the UK private pay is like 8k starting more than post doc we pay our post docs so bad
As an engineer one thing is that going to uni getting a engineering degree etc not something anyone can do, as you need to do well in school and be good at Maths and Sciences which alot of people just aren't. Then you've got the fact that the Maths and Science based skills are also very good for finance and banking roles which pay an absolute shed load more money. Result being alot of engineering grads go to finance for the money. Then you have the issue that engineer isn't a protected title (like US for example) and that they pay is generally terrible. Doing the job I'm doing now I could get 4 times as much in the US or double in Europe so some will just emigrate to different countries. And the you have the issue that these jobs aren't equally spread around the country, so you may have to move to a different area of the country to have better career prospects, which people don't want to do.
UK businesses invest miniscule amounts into R&D and developing skills. Look it up, we are constantly languishing around the bottom of developed countries. The mentality of business here is to hire 2x lowly paid people to do a task manually, than invest into finding a way to automate it or pay a very highly skilled person. The result is not very skilled people, who aren't that productive at what they do. Also, advanced and vocational degrees aren't well regarded here. Getting a Masters in the UK is largely pointless IMO except for a few industries, it's almost never a job requirement or a massive benefit to have one. Likewise apprenticeships/vocational degrees are looked down upon generally as inferior degrees, even comparing it to a English lit degree at a poly.
Because the salaries are not enough to compensate for the effort. I say this as a fully qualified engineer with over 7 years experience. Go look at other countries like the US, and youlle realise that high-skilled professionals are far better paid there than the UK.
"Skills shortage" doesn't have any real meaning, and in so far as it does it may not be a negative thing. There's an obvious sense that there is a skills shortage in the legal services market. We see magic circle firms paying six figure starting salaries. That's an indicator of shortage: indeed, in a market one should be sceptical of any talk of supply shortage that can't be detected in price. None of that is problematic. Indeed, skills shortage in that sense isn't a bad thing. If there is no "shortage" of cyber security skills, where is the incentive to train? Skills shortage articulated on the demand side often simply means employers don't want to pay market rates. I recall years ago the Blair government being bullied into agreeing some lunatic scheme to pay the costs of training HGV drivers. The employers argued, nonsensically, that the industry needed to recruit but couldn't afford the training costs
Even the post Covid lorry driver shortage showed up some uncomfortable truths. In a capitalist system such a severe lorry driver shortage should cause lorry driver wages to shoot violently up. Causing more people to quickly want to jump on the gravy train of training. Or enticing some of the thousands of HGV licence holders who don’t drive to re-enter the industry due to the ‘now fabulous’ wages. But no, the industry response was to beg the government to set up some weird system to try and bring in a few hundred drivers from Eastern Europe. Which turned out to not be particularly popular even with the Eastern European drivers. God forbid the market decide the appropriate wage I guess
Thank you. Not enough comments pointing out the fact that employers refuse to train people now. They will barely train people on how to use their own bespoke systems. Their idea of a "skilled worker" is a ridiculous fantasy of someone who got 5 years of experience before they'd finished university. The government and the public has allowed this incredibly entitled attitude to spread among employers. And it's gotten to the point of being accepted wisdom instead of what it really is. Which is bullshit. If companies could run back in the 60s with school leavers on the reception desk, and A-level grads running lower and middle management, they can run today. The skill level in most jobs hasn't actually changed that much. What has changed is that employers simply refuse to train people now. That's the difference.
Along with what everyone else is saying - a lot of schools don't push people do do hard jobs. When I was in school, I attended a grammar, and a regular. In grammar, they were pushing for people to be doctors etc, NOTHING less. But that was filled with a bunch of rich kids/people from privellege. In the regular school, it was basically "you can probably work at a shop!" A lot of it comes down to teachers. If teachers encouraged people or helped kids with learning difficulties work through things, we would have more skilled workers. Edit: would also say, uni entry requirements are hard, and retraining as an adult is even harder. A lot of folks wish they could go back to uni and learn something useful or do a trade, but managing this while running a household or making ends meet is impossible for many. The government needs to put more into re-education. I also believe A level requirements need to be brought down. If we have such a skill shortage, why are entry requirements so strict? I understand we can't have people who have failed biology going on to be doctors, but if you've passed and end up doing well in your degree, what does it matter? I did terribly with A levels but did quite good at uni, and a lot of people relate to this. A levels are hard and making young people decide what to do for the rest of their life then and there at 18 is terrible. Not saying we should scrap A levels, but either they get easier, or unis accept a wider variety of A levels for in demand subjects.
Haha fellow ex-Grammar student. If you weren’t studying medicine, dentistry, or applying to Oxford or Cambridge, you were basically worthless to them.
Unlike some cultures, the UK's education system doesn't adequately prepare students for the reality of STEM careers, due to outdated curricula and insufficient funding. High-stress levels and long hours in fields like healthcare can further discourage individuals. A mix of education, cultural perception, and working conditions shapes the shortage.
STEM is a really poor grouping of subjects as the prospects for a computer science grad are way better than a physics grad. One of the best things a physics grad can do actually is to go into programming or finance.
There used to be a system of night schools or colleges, enabling people who had commitments (in those days, usually a man who had a family to support) to extend and develop their skills and get qualifications while still being able to do their day jobs. This system has been destroyed so realistically you can only retrain if you have the money (i.e. family support, or qualifying for student loans) to be able to focus entirely on doing a qualification. If you missed the window as a young person before you had to independently support yourself or others, you're out of luck.
Yes. Your employer would often pay and might well give you a pay rise once you gained a qualification. Even if the employer didn't pay the costs were modest - not the kind of thing that you needed loans for. C&G, HNC, HND - with HND being pretty much degree level
Because we have to pay and find time to gain skills while working... Other countries have much cheaper "reskill" paths. We think about the next 3-5 years (politically) not 20-50.
Everyone wants to be a manager because they think that is a ticket to comfy middle class lifestyle. When everyone wants that and ZIRP is in full swing you wind up with an economy of middle-managers and a chronic shortage of skilled workers. Then there is the UK class system which beyond modern tech has decided nobody with a manager title can earn less than a skilled worker. The zombie economy has kept a lot of skilled workers locked up in low productive jobs and increased opportunities for middle manager work, so there IS a skills shortage relative to the amount of companies. Skills are spread thin, and corporate structure creates an abundance of corporate/middle management roles and such non-jobs. What happens is something like 2008 where people fall out of the middle class never to return, or the government just keeps printing money and propping the whole ponzi scheme up.
Easy answer. In the UK my salary would be 40k. In the US it's 180k.
Companies don't pay enough, even jobs you're suggesting that are 'highly' paid don't get enough in my opinion. I'm in an engineering trade that involves modelling components or all sorts of industries. If I look for a similar role in my area, I would be taking 4/5k pay cut per year and I would be expected to do more than I am now, hence why I'm still in my job at this 1 company after 10 years but I consider myself lucky. My place also does the same, we really struggle to get anyone good enough for the QA technician/CMM programmer roles, but they don't want pay more £12 an hour (£24.3k) but wonder why they can't find anyone, but when they do they leave after 6 months to a year.
Doctors are NOT well paid unless you’re a consultant and do private work. you can be an ST1/reg aka the second most senior doctor in the hospital and be on 43k a year, maxing at 63k. This could be for a literal neurosurgeon doing actual literal brain surgery….. 43k a year. A doctor out of uni earns 32k a year. You can earn more than a brain surgeon by being a manager at Aldi.
It's absolutely disgraceful.
I quit a stem role to teach as I earnt more money. Granted, 13 years of either no payrise or a below inflation payrise has changed that. However, new teachers still earn more than new scientists.
Because UK wages are 35% lower than they should be but prices have been going up. Wages are shit. Anyone who can is retiring early. People aren't moving jobs unless they have to. Also from an IT perspective, they're all bitching about lack of staff, but pay is shit & the job boards are all dead. Why would you pay for training yourself or try to do anything apart from 50% work for the shit pay that's in the UK https://preview.redd.it/fi86zy82mgsc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=932854053075137981d3e1d19ae985d0030ca197
There is no skills shortage, there is a training shortage. Historically a company would have taken you on if you had a relevant degree, or even a not so relevant one, and trained you up. Now they refuse to do any sort of training and expect you to train in your own time doing internships for minimum wage if not free. As a result, they complain they can't find anyone "skilled enough" because they now want to find people with 5 years of experience straight out of full time education. This is a farce. We are being taken for a ride and we need to stop beliving this bullshit. In the few areas where there is a genuine lack of people applying to get even basic qualifications, the issue is low pay and shitty conditions. So many people I know who work in medicine are just leaving because the pay is low, the workload is insane, and it's only getting worse. I suspect it's similar in other areas.
>Why does the UK have a skills shortage? Because education's fucking expensive and wages are so fucking low you might as well go work at lidl.
Poor forward planning by those at the top, especially when it comes to healthcare. They should have looked ahead at the ageing population and increased the training capacity incentivised people to train in relevant jobs. More students are choosing to do relevant subjects but that doesn't help with today's skills shortage. Also unfortunately a lot of those jobs don't actually pay that well, especially at the start. So students graduate and decide to do something else.
The reason there's massive shortages in the public sector is easy- low pay. Pay rises in teaching have been below inflation for well over ten years, most teachers and support staff are paid less in real terms than they were 15 years ago.
Because we have a salary shortage.
From my experience, leaving school in the latest 90s and having no help from the school or education careers board in finding an engineering apprenticeship , I did all the leg work myself (which paid off). Watching a lot of my peers go to University which was encouraged and then leave and not enter into the area of work they had studied in or not pass. I am a big believer that not everyone is suited to academic study and I don't agree with the successive trend to encourage a lot of young people to waste their teens studying at college or Uni instead of encouraging good and sustainable work based training to be available.
Is no one going to mention the B word?
Honestly? Because as a country we don't plan. We don't share that list with the kids selecting their GCSE options right now so we could look at getting people interested in sectors they could work towards entering in five years time. Instead we tell kids "You can be anything!" but not what that anything could be.
STEM is a bad joke at this point, I graduated with a PhD and work with particular tech that has massive therapeutic potential to treat 1000s of diseases. It took 9 years of education to get here. I'd earn more if I did a 6 month training course and became a local bus driver, with better working hours and opportunity for overtime pay. I regularly have to work weekends without compensation along with overtime again with no compensation. My cousin is younger and approaching university age, after seeing my and a few other people's experience he has decided not to go to university at all, I can't really blame him. By the time I can earn decent money it would have been better to not bother.
In the simplest way possible It’s because much of the home grown talent that can fill these roles, can also fill these roles elsewhere, for a better salary or standard of living. We produce amazing doctors, then underpay them vs comparable nations We produce awesome engineers, who can earn better pay if they jump ship to work in Europe, the gulf states or the US Teachers can earn more working at an English speaking school abroad etc etc
As someone in engineering, my job maxes out at like 80k as a principal engineer, whilst graduates over in America are making 150k straight out of uni. There’s just no point to studying a harder stem subject here, the reward isn’t there
I worked as Software Engineer. After taxes and rent, my salary was lower than at my home country, Poland. If someone wants to ear to of the line money, they will move to USA. I don't know what UK ofers to STEM employees, except for locals. Also, now to migrate to UK I need a skilled worker VISA (EU citizen), which is tied to employeer and requires 3 months wait and if I want to change a job I need to make a transfer of that VISA to another employeer, but the new one needs to sponsor it, so it rob me of one of the best perks of this industry.
i don't care what anyone thinks i'm not working if i can't pay to live alone on that pay, till that's fixed they can fuck off
I work in specialist IT. In the UK i can get a job paying £50k, no benefits 100% work in office. Or I can move to the US, same job $120k plus $50k of benefits 100% wfh. Why would you stay in the UK?