I have spent some of the day that the latest unemployment figures were announced going through applications for a (part time) finance officer post with us, paying a mere £5,000 a year. Even with ads just in the Job Centre and Gwent Gazette we have had nearly 20 applications, and such is their quality we could shortlist almost all of them although sadly we won’t. And there, running through applicants’ c.v.s, is the story of the valleys decline – former employers Dunlop Semtex, British Steel and numerous other long-gone employers loom large. Reason for leaving is repeatedly given as ‘redundancy’ or ‘liquidation of company’. Many of these people won’t even appear in jobless statistics because they have partners, but their desire to work is no less.
While I suppose I should feel pleased that we have such a choice of good candidates, I don’t. I feel angry, really really angry, that so many hard working, decent people have been chucked on the scrap heap, scrambling for a part time job, and then blamed for being workshy and lazy.
Dr. Christopher Wood 12:57 am on 20 March, 2010 Permalink
Why should anyone be surprised at the dismal economic stats for Wales? Welsh Labour say they are interested in new ideas about building a high tech economy, but those are just empty words and this translates into a Wales that is slipping further and further behind – Wales spends hundreds of millions of money on research in its academic institutions yet we see very few spin-outs of substance.
Cardiff University has a Nobel Prize winner who never filed a meaningful patent on his pioneering work. A university the size of Cardiff should be producing spin-outs to boost the Welsh economy – but that’s not happening. There’s a university about 3,500 miles from Wales that has produced more jobs in spin-outs than all of the universities in Wales combined, has over an order of magnitude more registered patents than all of the universities in Wales combined, yet has only about the same number of post grads as Cardiff University. There’s a university in Chicago that lacks an engineering faculty (in contrast to Cardiff and Swansea universities which both house sizeable engineering departments/research groups – yet this Chicago University has far more issued patents than Cardiff and Swansea combined. Swansea has had a supercomputer on its campus for some years now – yet Swansea struggles to get patents on its technology which is further surprising as Swansea houses an IP orientated law department.
Just today I had a long conversation with an amazing physicist located in a Welsh university – he told me that the bureaucracy involved in getting a patent is cumbersome/very slow – that the ‘enterprise’ unit at his university lacks staff with actual experience of getting patents allowed and misinform him on basic patent issues.
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