As the economy begins to worsen (in this part of the world, at least) and workers are made redundant, I see this happening a lot:
- Persons like me, who are abundant in straight-out practical experience (having done just about everything it is possible to do in the industry) but who are weak on academic qualifications, get retrenched.
- While they retain those with high academic qualifications, but whose practical experience with anything ranges from the meagre to the non-existent.
Ironically, at the same time as this pattern has been developing over the last 25 years, the skills base (particularly that now-endangered species, Common Sense!) has deteriorated at about the same pace.
We witnessed an example of this here in yesterday's lightning storm, which threatened to shut the whole operation down for up to 12 hours. In earlier times, if a point was supplied through several different high voltage power lines, these would be routed in different directions, so that the same lightning storm would be unlikely to take out both. However, the hot-shot characters who designed this power system saw fit to run the two high voltage lines side by side - almost gauranteeing that both will be tripped out by the same lightning hit.
This is just one example of the near-extinction of common sense that I could cite:
- the rest would nearly fill a volume.
(The observations of a grumpy old man!)
Bill.