Gadgets Today, But Employment Tomorrow?

If manufacturing is to have a future, we have to get more young people to see it as a career with a future. And we have to do it before the current skilled generation retires and there's no-one left to train the youngsters.
 

Unfortunately, the more of it that gets outsourced, the less of it they can see around them. There are so few manufacturing facilities these days that many young people's only encounter with manufactured goods are the consumer goods that modern teenage life is built around, from consoles to phones and computer access to social networking sites via the internet.

 

So it makes sense to focus on these consumer goods to re-introduce the idea to young people that they have to be designed and manufactured somewhere, by real people. That's the general point of the madeinnations site, of course, but it's also the focus of the COOLXmas project. By involving students in what is, in effect, a huge stock-take of consumer goods on the basis of country of origin, we hope to get them thinking about where future employment is going to come from.

 

If all the coolest gadgets around are made somewhere else than your own country, that's probably not going to inspire you much to think of a career in designing and manufacturing new ones. So hopefully students will start to think about why so few consumer goods are made locally, and if they're actually trading gadgets today for unemployment tomorrow.