35K chase 1,000 Jaguar jobs as skills gap grows

http://carandvannews.co.uk/2012/04/25/35...gap-grows/

It isn't just JLR who are swamped with applicants. In the Merchant Navy we have over 180,000 unfilled posts worldwide due to skills shortage - cheap eastern European crews are just that, cheap, but for the most part they have little skill and almost no management ability. My employer has just unilaterally ended it's secondment program to another company and brought all of us who were outsourced to a German company back into the main fleet because they cannot recruit suitable personnel. In the last 2 years though they have only recruited 110 trainees who take 4 years to get to qualified.................... and there is on average 50% annual wastage as people fall by the wayside/get married and leave the profession. For the 56 cadet posts advertised in the UK this year more than 1000 school leavers applied. Unfortunately from what I can gather many of the applicants were turned down because their writing and maths skills are not good enough as our qualification system requires people to be trained to a standard that assumes that all the hi-tech gear onboard has broken and we have to use paper, pencil, sextant and log tables to find out where we are and modern school leavers just are not equipped to cope with no computers/ word processing/ excel/ powerpoint!

(26-04-2012 09:50am)XFullFatTim Wrote:  It isn't just JLR who are swamped with applicants. In the Merchant Navy we have over 180,000 unfilled posts worldwide due to skills shortage - cheap eastern European crews are just that, cheap, but for the most part they have little skill and almost no management ability. My employer has just unilaterally ended it's secondment program to another company and brought all of us who were outsourced to a German company back into the main fleet because they cannot recruit suitable personnel. In the last 2 years though they have only recruited 110 trainees who take 4 years to get to qualified.................... and there is on average 50% annual wastage as people fall by the wayside/get married and leave the profession. For the 56 cadet posts advertised in the UK this year more than 1000 school leavers applied. Unfortunately from what I can gather many of the applicants were turned down because their writing and maths skills are not good enough as our qualification system requires people to be trained to a standard that assumes that all the hi-tech gear onboard has broken and we have to use paper, pencil, sextant and log tables to find out where we are and modern school leavers just are not equipped to cope with no computers/ word processing/ excel/ powerpoint!

Ah...............log tables and slide rules - brings back memories.
I still have an old set of them from school days, which I showed to my daughter - she laughed whilst falling off her chair (and txting at the same time innit!)

(26-04-2012 09:50am)XFullFatTim Wrote:  that all the hi-tech gear onboard has broken and we have to use paper, pencil, sextant and log tables to find out where we are and modern school leavers just are not equipped to cope with no computers/ word processing/ excel/ powerpoint!

What kind of world do you speak of with no computers or spell checks?

I have people that freak out when the email server is down because the web host screwed something up. They have to pick up the phone and talk to people or use a fax machine!

Although I'm not surprised, it takes a dedicated person to work in different places all the time. Tim you the man

99.9999% of the time we are in the 21st century using differential GPS and email and my next ship even has broadband Internet over satellite but if the big hurdy-gurdy downstairs stops and the lights go out it's back to the 19 century systems that only fail when the sun and stars cannot be seen!