Education, Jobs and skills database for schools
I would like to suggest a database to contain the following information for children at school to access from the ages of 14 -16.
I would like this website / database to be called "what to do next"
This database ideally would contain the number of precicted skill shortages in each area of employment, the number of university places, the number of apprentices / part time degrees available and a general honest overview of the job market in general.
This would be a great portal to make sure that we are not offering education at the tax payers expense or burdening people with debt with no real prospect of work - Or funding the education of those that we then lose to another conutry,
I would like to see teachers access it to provide away days to different companies, I would like the private sector to be able to engage with the website to give advice and share concerns with their potential employees.
I was appauled at the lack of information, motivation and guidance that my niece rec'd when she was in 6th form - she really had no idea what to do, stayed on in further education with no real aim, felt rejected, no path and this was at my expense as a tax payer.
I think it would also be a great way for the government to be able to influence what skills and innovation we need.
I would like to see this website/database to be constucted by the brightest graduates that we have in education, to be user tested by the 14-18 year olds and to be funded by the private sector. It is more important than ever that we educate within a tight budget, I think you would be shocked to hear what most kids "want to be when they grow up"
Thanks to the media - most want to be Katie Price or Ashley Cole.
Comments (6)
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Education, Jobs and skills database for schools
no, no , no. the job of govt is not to be a nanny state provider of info and career choices - it is up to individuals and the market to help people choose. There is plenty of information out there on what different jobs pay, what the state of the economy is for different sectors and in different locations, and if people think they have to be spoonfed info even for the most important choices in their lives then they are behaving in a lazy way which should not be encouraged. Whilst there is a case for making sure careers advisors are sufficiently well informed and trained to give good advice, this does not warrant setting up new databases and bureaucracy.
Great idea
I completely agree. We run a small, predminantly only business and have been trying to recruit a trainee carpenter and it's been far more difficult than we would have anticipated. It seems very few youngsters are taking up manual skills these days, but there is still very much the call for these type of jobs. Perhaps combined with such a database the government could also give data on the availability of positions within various sectors also, so that some of them might have the confidence to pursue work in a given sector when they know jobsare available.
This does sound like a
This does sound like a brilliant idea! The only issue I can forsee is that as an employer at the moment you get your pick of prospective employees WITHOUT having to fund top graduates setting up a database and I think the government would need quite a bit of convincing as to it's merit. NONE THE LESS, I wish something like this had been available to me...
This is a fantastic idea -
This is a fantastic idea - but I feel the data and the portal that you speak of should be separated. There are many websites that do a reasonable job of helping 18 year olds choose what to do next - they should all have the opportunity to integrate this data within their system.
This would mean the data could be linked to the most relevant information on how to succeed, such as the best university, how others have 'made it' etc (of course, these are subject to the website having access to this data, which is not too difficult)
I do particularly like your idea of providing interaction between teachers, companies and students to help students build an image of what their potential could achieve, but colleges and universities must provide relevant courses as well, hopefully this website would be able to distinguish the practical and theoretical courses (ie which prepare you for work and which merely teach some basic info scattered all over the web)
Hopefully this can get off the ground.
Maybe, but be careful..
In princible it could be useful, but there are a various of issues that make the long term implications less clear.
This approach assumes that people will "slot in" to the existing distribution of society. I think the idea could work very well for certain industries, others however, particularly hi-tech (at the moment) can evole faster than the education system's "time to employment", which makes them hard to predict. You could probably guess at growth in general, but particular specialisms are prone to change.
The approach could also be considered to discourage change. There's a careful balance to be struck between meeting workforce needs, and encouraging people to try new approaches and innovate. Both are important for a progressive society.
You also want to avoid introducing a pendulum effect, where large numbers are recommended down a particular path for a few years, only to flood that profession and deprive others, then have to swap and repeat with a different path.
Finally the current data on the subject isn't exactly robust - it'd involve a significant element of estimation/modelling. Not a problem it itself, but it does make it a little more vague and would need to be considered only a guide - some people would not see it that way.
Dispite these issues, I do agree that some souce of information about the current state of the market would be useful in supporting informed choices, as long as it was purely informative and made clear it was only one relevant factor.
I'd be worried if it were to become a basis for incentive schemes and the like, which would be far more likely to bring out the negative elements mentioned above.