This evening was the Young Enterprise Scotland regional finals dinner to which I went as the corp had bought a table. It was well worth it for the chat (decent grub too) and gave me a number of thoughts.

Doug Richards and Jellyellie spoke as guests and were both entertaining - Doug for terrible, hilarious stories about his greatest mistakes and revenge, Jellyellie as “the voice of the MSN generation” (Guardian, 2006) with tips to succeed for the young people there. I am no longer a young person, (my lifeclock should trip shortly) so it is interesting to hear someone who grew up saturated in technology talk to us walking dead - more anon.

The kids were shockingly savvy and together, though these were the self-selecting motivated, presentable ones who were interested in engaging with the grinding monolith of ‘business’… and here we return to a recent trope; there were lots of would be lawyers and business people and we were told marketers and suchlike… and a single engineer. Now, sure, there’s the ’select for business’ bias in the group, but Elly the Engineer said that of her classmates she was the only one thinking of going sci-tech.

This, I think, is going to cause a painful pinch in a few years as the labor market dries up due to lack of hard science skills. I think Mervyn King, Bank of England governor, has a point that its not a great thing that the City is sucking up talent that should be doing stuff - if only because its a one-way flow engineers can do finance (as my ex-colleagues down there testify) but I’ve yet to see a market analyst develop a field.

However, Elly the Engineer will I hope be encouraged by the ‘oh, cool’ reaction she got from half the table (a mechie, a chem eng, a multi-classed senior exec/pipelines eng, and the token res eng) and has gone away with ‘call us, if we can do anything for you, call us’ and the emails of the HR half of the table. This was really the first time I’ve run in ‘evangelise’ mode - all the Setpoint stuff is very basic and the jobs fairs is them pestering us - and it made me realise how much I’ve internalised the ‘we’re $%^ed’ message from all the reports - the Big Crew Change in the oil industry where 50% of our engineers become eligible to retire by 2012 with no sign of who the hell is going to replace them all, on top of a general trend (UK and Ireland)of physics and maths numbers declining at schools level.

I do hope Elly sticks with the tough stuff and comes to us (engineers, not oil specifically) otherwise, God only knows how we’re going to do the heavy lifting of upgrading out of a dirty hydrocarbon fueled economy into something better. Its already biting in the failure of the mystical magical economic models to conjure new oil out of high prices. Actually, I worry in a cerebral sense, emotionally, I’m just getting more and more annoyed at ‘can’t someone else do it’ mentality implicit in everyone being a lawyer or marketer.

But to close on a positive note, its not as if the ability isn’t there - those kids were sharp as razors.

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