Personal Blogs

[ 7 minute read ]

You can't stand in the way of progress or change

It seems that if you are renting out a house in Funafuti, Tuvalu, it is unnecessary to include in the description that it is two minutes walk to the beach. There is a picture on the FRANCE 24 News website of Tuvalu as a strip of land in the Pacific ocean, midway between Australia and Hawaii, that has houses along its length and, I would guess, takes about six minutes to walk from the beach on one side of the island to the other beach on the other side of the long and very thin island.

'Discover the unspoiled paradise of Tuvalu, one of the smallest and most remote nations in the world. Explore the atolls, lagoons, reefs, beaches, diving, culture and history of this South Seas destination.' says timelesstuvalu.com. 

Sometimes, businesses use a particular type of marketing that plays on our desire to not miss out on a good deal. Those businesses offer a deal for a limited period, or for the first hundred customers, or so. The quote from timelesstuvalu.com remarkably does not include 'while you can', or 'this offer ends soon'. According to climatologists, Tuvalu will inevitably disappear under the waves.

Something that struck me was that the residents cannot get away from the lifestyle of beach-life. Given, they may like eating fish and swimming but there is no skiing or bungee-jumping there. Where do they go on holiday? 

I lived in a very picturesque village for most of my life; I was born there. There was a camp-site in Summer that was a field for grazing a dairy herd in the other months. One year, I came across a teenage girl, my age, and got chatting to her. She told me she was from Clacton, in the county of Essex, England. I was amazed. Clacton is a seaside resort. Why would anyone leave a seaside resort to go on holiday? I was ignorant. Being inland for her was different. There was a river that she could swim in and lovely green fields and village-type stuff; chocolate-box / picture-postcard village stuff like thatched houses and winding paths and lanes.

My parents, of course, would take us to the seaside for our holidays. We had use of a beach-house while we were there. A beach-house in the UK is a small, single room, wooden hut planted directly on the beach and is for day use, like changing into swimming costumes and cooking shell-fish on a little gas powered cooker. Great memories. Yet, the passage of time has changed that holiday town to be practically unrecognisable to me. The roads and streets are still there; the amusement arcades are still there, but the harbour is now unusable. It is full of sand. No-one dredges it now that fishing is no longer viable in that area. It used to be that we, as kids, could, when the tide was in, reach the sea from the beach-house in less than twenty seconds; and old ship-wrecks were washed right up to the sand dunes. These days, there is an undulating desert of sand before one can reach the sea, six minutes walk away. That is the width of Tuvalu in some places, it seems.

Locally

There is a telephone-box library in my neighbouring village. In England, almost all of the iconic red telephone boxes were dug up and removed when mobile (cell) phones became ubiquitous. Once everyone had a personal phone the public phone boxes disappeared, and now very small children have to run a lot further and faster when they fell off their bicycles and need help. Where I lived, when I was a kid, there were just lots and lots of fields and one telephone box per village. However, a few red telephone boxes were saved. They had shelves installed and these were filled with unwanted, second-hand books. Anyone can take these books, supposedly for a while, but if you keep one there isn't a gap on the shelf for more than a week, because someone shoves another book in its place. 

I found a book on ageing in the telephone-box library. Having started a couple of businesses in the past and recognising a gap in the job-recruitment market, I thought I might start a recruitment agency specifically to get upper-age-group people into work or new jobs. Best learn about people over fifty then, I thought. That was over a year ago. Yesterday, I opened the book and discovered it is actually a collection of papers on ageing; how reflexes deteriorate or not, and the such-like. There is a whole bunch more reports in it, but I stopped reading when I recognised that none of the studies included more than a handful of people in their seventies. The book was published in 1972. Today, I have gotten used to people working when they are in their seventies, in the area in which I live. My next-door neighbour is one hundred and two and I am amazed at his mental acuity. He still goes somewhere everyday with his flask of something and sandwiches, both in the morning and afternoon. Perhaps he goes on picnics with  new girlfriends.

Just as Tuvalu will cease to exist, and the beach I played on every summer has expanded; and just as holidays are taken because people desire change, people have also changed. I am only just realising that we cannot expect the world to stay the same if we change. Most of us have adapted; many have not. It sees it is difficult for many people to accept inevitability in their lives. They think they are King Cnut (Canute) in the eleventh century AD, and can hold back the tide.

Where I live there is bad sentiment towards a new railway line. Many of the complainers will not be alive to reap the benefits derived from riding a train from the east side of the south of England to the west side of the south of England. Yet, they are the most vociferous at the village hall in their protests. 

'Noise'

'Disruption'

'Can't sleep'

'Noise'

When I was seventeen, I worked in Bavaria, fifty miles (80km) east of Munich (München), in Germany. I lived in the 'Railway Hotel' - Bahnhof Gasthaus, directly opposite the train station. That train station was also a shunting yard for goods. Bang! Bang! at one in the morning, three in the morning, throughout the nights. I got used to it and after a week slept through it. Bear in mind that I was born and bred in a rural area where the loudest thing we heard was a cow. I am pretending there were no occasional Phantom F4 fighter planes howling overhead. OOOOO Wooooo. They were flying really slowly in England.

I have had a few conversations with the opponents to building a rail link between cities in the nearby fields. They are concerned about their property prices. They can't spend the money when they are no longer alive. They thought they could retire in the village but now their peace will be ruined. I am always left with the overwhelming feeling that these people have deceived themselves for their whole lives. When they were young and entering the job market, they lived in a world that was far different to the world we live in now. They could expect to be able to pay for a mortgage on a house from their forty or fifty years of work earnings. The 1980s had not happened and there were areas of derelict land and abandoned houses. 

In the late 1990's I started to feel sorry for people who persisted in thinking that everything they knew at that time would be all they would need to know today. Another neighbour I have, not yet fifty years old, has not realised that specialisation in large sectors of the work environment is fading fast. Now, there are specialists with PhDs and everyone else needs to have skills and attributes in an ever-widening scope of activity. Right from the hod-carrier on the building sites of yesteryear, who now needs to be a general labourer who can read plans, drive plant machinery, operate hydraulic machinery, and most importantly, not go to the pub at lunchtime; to the head of a department in an office environment who needs to hand off their capabilities and ability to computer algorithms, that he or she is expected to be able to manipulate, control, and assist.

The existence of Tuvalu will pass just as inevitably as our own idea that what we once knew would always be enough for our future. We cannot hold back the tide just as we cannot move away from progress, or prevent it spilling into our back yards.

Competitiveness in a fast changing world

Perhaps I should add this: If I was to start a logistics business with warehousing, no-one applying for the simplest role in the warehouse would get an interview without a Level 5 Diploma in Warehousing, Logistics, or Supply Chain Management; no-one applying for a driving role would get an interview without an Advanced Driving pass certificate, or a ADR (dangerous goods) pass certificate, or a current Driver CPC pass (Certificate of Professional Competence) or a FORS Driver certificate (Fleet Owners Recognition Scheme), AND MUST HAVE a certificate demonstrating completion of Health, Safety and Environmental Preservation, AND demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the most up to date UK Highway Code. Not only that, they would, as part of the interview, need to navigate from and to, set points in the UK, using only printed maps. No-one applying for an office role would get an interview without a level three award, certificate, or diploma, in Customer Services. Front-line customer-facing staff should also have a minimum of a level 2 certificate in Negotiation before an interview would be granted.

A Mental Health in the Workplace certificate would be good too.

Just saying.

To all those who are not delighted with their degree pass score: Even graduates with a first, would not get a job flipping burgers in my Burger Bar without having a Michelin Star. 

What I am trying to say, is that, for me, it is the diversity and combination of education, certification, and qualifications that is important; not the level of a single qualification.

Decades of experience means so many different things: stuck in a manner of behaviour; resistant to change; someone consistently employed by mediocre businesses; anything. It might also indicate, a leader who keeps abreast of industry progresses. But this last means that much evidence of further education should be available, and, for me, it must encompass a wide spectrum of knowledge for even a supervisor role, with any business I might own.