Down time

Years ago La Lobster was described by an employee as 'always on the move'. Well, she's learnt her lesson and only does things strategically these days. The biggest time waster is The Meeting - especially when not run by yours truly. The worst - the 'Breakfast Meeting' - La Lobster HATES these. If you expect la Lobster to speak any time between 7am and 8am, she'd got news for you. B.. Off.



Via: Online Schools

Statistical clap trap

Ok, let's get serious for a change. Earlier this week, the BBC's Mark Easton posted a piece on the UK's supposedly ill matched job vacancies vs job seekers. Now come on, everyone knows any statistics can be rolled out to support any argument - even diametrically opposed arguments can be supported by the same stats with a judicious tweek here and there.

I know I am not alone in regarding the UK's official statistics as deeply flawed. Nevertheless, we all need some material to work with and, if that's all we've got, we'll just have to see what we can do with them. The days of accurate counting have long gone unfortunately so we should never make assumptions. We have some critical thinking to do to make sense of what, if anything, the stats we have can tell us.

What I want to know is exactly how many people are resident in the UK at the moment?...No, I do not think the census estimates are anything near to accurate; (I worked on the 2001 Census - I saw then how under reporting was occurring). Advance eight years, with all the changes to the EU in between, no way can the estimates help. It amused me, (ok only slightly), to discover that an offical US department was using a population estimate of 80 million for the UK - well, perhaps they aren't far wrong? Now let's look again at the question of employment seeking. How many asset rich, income poor people, disqualified from claiming benefits are looking for work? You can't tell me because no one is even thinking to capture the numbers. I believe the numbers would shock if ever they could be found. I believe they could make the 'official' figure for unemployment look ridiculously slight.

At a weekend event I attended not so long ago, 60% of the 10,000 attendees claimed to be 'self-employed'. Oh yes, and not happily self employed either. Life's tough and getting tougher.

Teenagers wronged

A press release from the Learning and Skills Council claims that teenagers have an unrealistic idea of what it takes to get into certain high paying positions or careers. Apparently, teenagers believe they do not need to undertake post-secondary education to get plumb positions in TV, on the soccer field and in other media associated roles. These just fall out of the sky, it seems. Well doesn't that just fit with certain prejudices? The study was supposedly done to encourage more students to investigate the LSC's Education Maintenance Allowance to offer the students more financial support - the principle reason 56% of the kids surveyed stated they would need to consider further education. Apart from missing its mark, I'd say the LSC has just wasted a whole bunch of money on a spurious study. The LSC's results are based on an online study of 2563 16-19 year olds only in England. 26% or 666 made the assertion reported by the LSC above. This is hardly representative, especially when seen against the 2008 population estimate for this age group in England of 3,325,000. So, there you have it, 0.02% of a presumably self-selecting group of people indicate an opinion that is little more than prejudice personified. Time for the LSC staff to go back to school perhaps?