Future of Manufacturing

Hello Andy:

With the rapid pace of technology over ones lifetime I don't believe a "secure" job exists anymore.

Where "secure" means doing the same basic function (example accounting) over say 40 years, even while working for different organizations.  

Over has to be flexible as one technology dies and another replaces it, constantly learning new areas of expertise.

Peter 

Harry Sullivan said:

are in secure, well paid job

or even just "secure, reasonably paid jobs"!

A very reasonable point. I think the question of whether a manufacturing resurgance does something to address wealth inequality is a complex one. Certaily the service and digital economy seems to rely on a mass of poorly paid gig economy workers and an increasingly small, very highly paid core of AI/developer skills, and business models that lead to huge concentrations of weath. I suppose that a resurgance of manufacturing if highly automated brings a relatively small (relative to the wealth generated) number of well paid, highly skilled jobs, but addressing wealth inequality has to meen expanding the size of the. pool of people who are in secure, well paid job, unless the surpllus generated by automation is fed into some form of UBI type system but I suspect that is not around the corner anytime soon. 

Hello Andy:

How quickly we forget the message from past IET president Sir Julian Young about the technical training that is /can be obtained by joining the Military service - in his case in was the RAF and maintenance of Military aircraft. 

On a person note when I about 13 yeas old I joined my school's Cadet's organization so I had the chance to legally use Transmitter/Receiving equipment off campus and use the "in school" shooting range, with a 303 riffle. 

Peter 

Harry Sullivan said:

a strategy for maximum wealth for all nations.

This avoids mention of just who will have that wealth. It needs to address the inequality of the wealth of the people. 

Wealth for the few, poverty for the many is less than ideal, even if they are in 'full menial employment'.

We probably need to rethink the idea of 'manpower' and get away from it's equivalence to 'horse power'. Lawyers may charge for cognition by the hour, but we some hard thinking to do.

Roger Greenwood said:

I suspect the colleges consider themselves purely academic (which of course they are) and what is needed is a training centre linked to a college, like this one https://wyms.co.uk/apprenticeships where employers can pick employees from. At the moment they don't operate like that, but they could.

And also (as a counteract to Peter's point on University finances, which are somewhat different) because FE Colleges are publicly funded they have very little funding, so they do not have the admin resources to do any more than literally deliver training. Further than that, a few years ago when I was more involved with them several were making noises about moving out of covering engineering subjects altogether because they couldn't manage the costs of labs and workshops.

My experience of FE staff is that they would love to have a broader role in apprenticeship than simply academic delivery, but there just aren't the resources there for them to do so.

Which of course all links to Harry's point below, do we want to continue the progression to a more complete free market model where ideally we close all the FE Colleges (because we don't want government funding of anything), with the theory that if employers want staff then they'll develop them, or do we consider that the other point of view Harry pulled out is correct that it's a societal problem that we should solve as a society and so we should be developing state supported apprenticeships more. Or some tweak moving the status quo more toward one or the other of these. Or indeed do we take the extreme free market view that if manufacturing collapses then that's the right thing to happen because it's what the market decided and the market's always right.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I think anyone who's read my posts will have guessed that personally I'm no great fan of  unfettered free market economics. But other views exist. In the end there are just different actions and different consequences, and it's for each of us to decide what consequences we feel comfortable with.)

I'm a regular reader of the Economist and find that their range of topics and intellectual focus, without too much pandering to political partisanship makes it a good weekly read. That being said, in this instance I think though the article is more nuanced than it first reads, there is a bit of the Economists natural tendency towards Economic liberalism showing.

The economist is a proponent of free trade, open markets, and leveraging comparative advantage as a strategy for maximum wealth for all nations. In an ideal world I believe that they would be right, and that nations, especially more developed ones should be able to leverage the high value per-worker services sectors, including those relating to production, such as design, automation etc for wealth creation and trade, whilst buying manufactured goods from places that already specialise in that. But - as acknowledge by the Economist in the article - manufacturing capability bring inherent security and resilience to weather a dangerous world ridden with tensions, war, tariffs and closed market policies/politics. in the world we do live in, rather than the ideal world of perfect free trade, it is in every nations interest to maintain a strong manufacturing base, even if the economic arguments for doing so may be less strong than the security/resilience arguments. Where they do make a good argument regarding the politics is the acknowledgement that the job creation potential for modern manufacturing is far less substantial than in the manufacturing of old. This is undoubtably true, but again I think under-prices that value in developing and maintaining the high-value and hopefully high paid skills that are required for developing and maintaining a modern, largely automated manufacturing base, and the multiplier effects and additional jobs in the local economy and supply chains that these bring - especially when targeted at currently underperforming regions, such as the UKs long neglected manufacturing regions. 

Hello David:

I always remember a "tongue in the cheek" Goon show joke that " Britain was a first class criminal nation!"

Peter

In the UK, Further Education (FE) is post-secondary education,  pre degree level, such as A-levels, T levels, vocational training, City and Guilds courses and apprenticeships.

Technical colleges are/were centres of FE.

Higher education (HE), on the other hand,  involves degree-level study at universities and/or  university colleges, including undergraduate degrees, also called bachelor's, (BA BSc,) and the term is sometimes extended to include post graduate qualifications (master's degrees  MPhil, MA, MSc), and Doctoral degrees (such as a PhD, DPhil, DLit)

Polytechnics always were HE and have long awarded degrees, at least since the early 20th century ( initially subject to syllabus scrutineering from BTEC and CNAA), and since 1992  consider themselves universities, and can set and award their own degree courses, albeit often ones with a less academic lean than the traditional universities.

Perhaps confusingly, many of the new 1960s polys were created by adding the extra capability to existing technical colleges, & sometimes retained the informal name of the technical college and at leat initially retained  a mix of FE and HE. Since 1992, as above, the naming situation has simplified.

Mike.

Hello Roger:

The old names were Technical Colleges or Polytechnics.

I see that in 2022 the Blair "think tank" issued a statement that 70% of young people should be going into "higher" (whatever that actually means)  education by 2040.

Peter