One of the most nonsensical aspects about the modern economy is how skills appear to be utterly irrelevant to doing a job. This is of course a complete farce which has no danger of abating.
Take for example Chris Grayling, who did history at Cambridge, becoming a Justice Secretary of State, or Theresa May who did geography at Oxford, doing the Home Secretary job. Chris Grayling, with oversight of the Equality Act, must surely regret his remarks about gay people potentially being banned in hotels. George Osborne did not have a background in economics, but that did not stop him reversing the UK economy from growth into recession within the space of two years. The same phenomenon of people swopping the top jobs in government is same as people swopping the top jobs as CEOs – it doesn’t matter if you’re working for a healthcare company, and then working for a privatised utility the next.
The most startling aspect of this for me is how there is a lack of talented people in medical charities. There are very few medics in these medical charities, and senior managers simply get shuffled from one charity from another. It’s exactly like the current Cabinet reshuffle – it does not matter what area of specialism you happen to have, the same mediocre people do the same job. Is there such a shortage of people to do these jobs with the right skills? No, because recruiters are fundamentally lazy – they look for any cheap measure possible for ‘sifting’ their applications, and fundamentally do not care what the outcome for their organisation is.
This aspect of the working society in the UK is fundamentally pathological. People who worked hard for the GCSE English may end up with a grade lower than they wished through no fault of their own, which even OFQUAL concedes is unfair. There is little correlation between your school and university qualifications and your ability to be a suitable applicant for a job, not least because a lot of people have top GCSEs and a II.1 at least.
This is simply a farce, and many people just ‘grin and bear it’, without having the confidence to say that this is simply incompetent.
