e-skills: EU – Economic Underclass
There are a number of trends that do not point to a bright future for Europe:
- There is no coherent strategy in respect of the development of a 21st century high tech workforce
- The educational systems are not geared towards a tech-centric future
- Very few IT qualifications both align with the real world and are worth more then the certificate paper. This is particularly true of IT related-degrees, which generally presume that everyone wants to be a hardware engineer or work in IBM’s research labs.
- Eastern economies in particular are fast moving up the value chain from manufacturing through services into the realms of intellectual property.
As the middle classes of the emerging economies get into the multi-billions they will be looking for cheap destinations to provide their ‘must have, but don’t need products and services.
Fast forward five years. Imagine, just for example, Spain, Hungary, Italy and Turkey being the successor of the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) off shoring destinations. Europe is now the planet's low value labour pool.
It doesn’t look good does it?
@
Ade,
I suspect the EU will not hold exclusive rights to this ‘Economic Underclass’ as things don’t look a whole lot different here in North America.
But as they say: “misery loves company.”