Competitiveness: Smart People - Smart Ideas - The right environment

Average just won't do and shoe-horning thousands of undergrads through any sort of university education is a very blunt strategy at best. It's clear that Ireland, the UK and many other Western economies need to major in areas where they can excel and have a rightful place in a global economy. This makes ultimate sense as no country can provide all of the outputs a global economy wants or demands - and this forces us all to ask "what are we the best at?". Not an easy question to answer as there were over 6 billion people on the planet last time I counted :) - that's some major competition especially as the Interweb thingy has been a great leveller.

At NMI we have been hearing concerns from our members for several years about the level of skills the UK is producing - especially for the electronics sector. We have a great heritage in design excellence and innovation however that is challenged for the future if we fail to bring in more bright minds to follow. This was the motivation that we had for creating the Skills Foundation (aka UKESF) - announced and launched on January 26th 2010. The skills team spent the early part of 2009 scrutinizing the concerns and testing these against available data - the latter half of 2009 was spent forming a collaboration to implement the end-to-end programme constructed to address the areas which need attention. This takes us from schools to undergrads to employment... a good start but we'll need to do more further on if we are to be the very best at whatever we decide we're best at.