Peter Jackson column

Mar 1 2007 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Farmers have long been famous for their grumbling, for being able to see the cloud encasing any silver lining.

This seems unfair to me, not because I entirely deny the charge on the farmers' behalf, but because it seems to single them out unfairly.

Surely the business community is at least as prone to bemoan its lot. If business is not grumbling about red tape, it is the strong pound, and, if it is not the strong pound, then it is high interest rates.

And, failing those, there's the hardy perennial of the woeful preparation for the world of work provided for our young people by the state education system.

That is not to say that business people - just like the farmers - don't have a case.

A recent survey revealed that millions of employees believed their lack of skills had cost their employers money.

Adult training agency Learndirect sampled 1,000 people and, projecting from the results of its survey, estimated that 14.6 million workers had lost their firms money because of literacy and numeracy mistakes.

Almost two in five of the people surveyed relied on work colleagues to check their calculations, and two-thirds relied on computer spell checks, rising to three-quarters among 16 to 30-year-olds.

This comes on the wake of Lord Leitch's Government commissioned report in December which warned that the UK's skills base was lower than that of many international competitors.

It detailed how no fewer than five million adults in this country lacked functional literacy, more than 17 million had difficulties with numbers and more than one in six youngsters left school unable to read, write or add up properly.

As if that wasn't enough in the way of gloomy reports, this week the Robert Walters recruitment company said it had never known UK graduates to be so poorly qualified for the job market.

What particularly struck me about Robert Walters's complaints was the claim fewer people are doing IT degrees than at any time during the past 15 years, because this bears out what I have recently been told by IT academics in North-East universities.

This must spell trouble for the future. You reap what you sow - as any farmer will tell you.