Nothing changes, it seems

As Neil's appointment coincided almost exactly with the 20th anniversary of my joining New Electronics, I thought it might be worth taking a look back to some issues from the latter part of 1994 to compare then and now. And it was a frankly depressing process; the issues being discussed then are much the same as those being discussed today. Here's an example from the editorial in the 8 November 1994 issue, written by Louise Joselyn. "We need to start, at early school age, encouraging children to think differently about the engineering profession. Theoretically," she said, "it shouldn't be difficult getting children to admire the developers of their electronic games and equipment." She then added: "The electronics industry needs heroes," accepting that, in 1994, it was already 'a long standing cry'. I wrote the editorial in the 13 December 1994 issue. This commented on an event at which the Federation of the Electronics Industries – an erstwhile industry association – was trying to promote the value of the UK's electronics industry to a bunch of parliamentarians. One of the presentations was made by Tom Hartman, then general manager of Intel's Ireland operation. He said Intel didn't want specialists, it wanted generally educated graduates who could then be trained by Intel in the specifics. But he also mentioned the opportunity for 'mature apprenticeships', in which older people could be retrained. Hartman also noted that, in Intel's opinion, 'jobs are obsolete, projects are the focus'. And I could go on. Although these are just a couple of snapshots, it makes you wonder what has been happening for the last two decades. Today, the conversations centre around how to convince schoolkids to be engineers; there is still the call for modern day engineering heroes; and there is, if engineeringUK is to be believed, a huge skills gap that could be filled by retraining people from other industries to be engineers. Why haven't we – not only as an industry, but also as a nation – been able to resolve issues that were being discussed two decades ago? I've been in the electronics industry for 34 years now and one of the continuing themes over that time has been 'short termism', with not enough focus on the future. Is it really the case that senior managers in the UK's electronics industry, as well as politicians and government officials, have been so concerned with what was happening 'today' that they couldn't find the time to deal with what was needed 'tomorrow'? Some things are outside of our control, but these issues are ones which we could – and should – have dealt with.