Posted to News on 2nd Feb 2010, 00:00
Wobbly picture? Do not adjust your set...
When a friend walked into a party wearing a top with a loud and pronounced zigzag pattern, I suggested that perhaps she needed to adjust her horizontal hold. Now, I'm not saying this was a tumbleweed-across-the-room moment exactly, but several people did look at me very blankly. Clearly you need to be of a certain age for the concept of adjusting your set to mean anything. And a quip to my kids about one of their movies, where the picture seemed to jump all over the place, that perhaps the tracking needed adjusting was met with a similar silence. The rule in our house seems to be that if daddy appears to be talking nonsense, just ignore him and hopefully he'll go away. Also just recently I was reminiscing to a youth who seemed permanently tethered to his computer about how when I started work back in '88, one of the perks of the job was the fact that I got the electric typewriter. And this was back in the days when a pink typewriter was one of the must-have Christmas presents for every young girl. The youth, however, was neither impressed, amused or, it has to be said, interested.
>Well, I'm starting to feel like a bit of an old man. If I think about it, I haven't actually adjusted the horizontal or vertical hold on a TV since I was a teenager. I don't think I've even seen a typewriter in the best part of 20 years. And I probably haven't watched a video in over a decade. Yet these are clearly concepts that make up part of who I am - ideas that are entrenched in my psyche, if you will.
>I wonder if these same entrenched ideas colour people's attitudes to apprenticeships, either for better or worse. If we hadn't had years of Alan Sugar barking rudely at groups of young hopefuls on the BBC's The Apprentice, and somehow managing to make it appear glamorous, would so many youngsters be applying for real world apprentice places? Or, conversely, if we had less Sugar and more sweet talking from careers advisors, would even more youngsters be applying? Then again how many youngsters must stop to wonder what the real difference is between someone who takes a job and learns as they go along, and an apprenticeship, where you take a job and learn as you go along, other than the fact that apprentices seem to be paid considerably less than 'real' employees? And don't shoot the messenger here - I'm just passing on complaints from youngsters who may or may not have been totally committed to the idea in the first place.
>There is certainly a big difference between a job and a career, and an apprenticeship is, without doubt, a genuine career choice. And it promotes and develops the skills that Britain will need to maintain (or perhaps, dare we hope, grow) its economic position. But although the government has been growing the numbers of available apprenticeship places for over a decade, you don't have to be particularly cynical to spot a link between its current fevered endeavours to massively expand places from the current 180,000 or so at exactly the time when it seems to have realised that earlier targets of 50% of school leavers going into higher education were economically unsustainable. Perhaps well trained apprentices are more upwardly mobile, and better equipped for sideways moves to bigger and better things, but who is in control of the horizontal and the vertical?
Mark Simms, 2 February 2010
