Nanos skill gaps

A survey aiming at identifying skill gaps of people who work in the area of nanotechnology found that:....42% of respondents identified that they faced human resource problems in their organisation such as availability of manpower with appropriate skills and right knowledge depth. While 58% of responses indicated that both generalist and specialist skill sets were valued by employers, 24% indicated a preference for generalist skills over 13% for specialists in organisations. A mixed approach is used by most organisations for employee training and development. Respondents indicated the most preferred training method being 26% for on the job-training, 22% for continual professional development, and 15% for short courses.

The survey recommends the following actions:

-- greater practical experience during post-graduate training, with focus on important competencies such as sol-gel, lithography, bottom up assembly and training in the use of SPMs and EMs


-- integrating competencies of material sciences, biology interface with nanomaterials and nanoscale effects in post-graduate programmes.

-- inclusion of knowledge of new materials, their properties and selection, and design methodologies for new product development.

-- development of short sector-based modular courses to allow continued training of the workforce, including toxicology, health and safety, intellectual property rights and important societal issues such as ethics

--training to include research and development management, project management, technology strategy, technology marketing, sustainability, risk assessment as elective modules for postgraduate

--training and professional development investigating specific training needs of sectors such as information and communication, medical devices and health care, electronics, aerospace, automotive, energy and power in relation to nanotechnology

--government bodies to increase funding for encouraging knowledge partnership through
creation of more science to business roles

Institute of Nanotechnology
www.nano.org.uk



THE FALL AND RISE OF DEVELOPMENT

THE FALL AND RISE OF DEVELOPMENT: The big push


The important point is that any kind of model of a complex system -- a physical model, a computer simulation, or a pencil-and-paper mathematical representation -- amounts to pretty much the same kind of procedure. You make a set of clearly untrue simplifications to get the system down to something you can handle; those simplifications are dictated partly by guesses about what is important, partly by the modeling techniques available. And the end result, if the model is a good one, is an improved insight into why the vastly more complex real system behaves the Way it does.

Why is our attitude so different when we come to social science? There are some discreditable reasons: like Victorians offended by the suggestion that they were descended from apes, some humanists imagine that their dignity is threatened when human society is represented as the moral equivalent of a dish on a turntable. Also, the most vociferous critics of economic models are often politically motivated. They have very strong ideas about what they want to believe; their convictions are essentially driven by values rather than analysis, but when an analysis threatens those beliefs they prefer to attack its assumptions rather than examine the basis for their own beliefs.

Still, there are highly intelligent and objective thinkers who are repelled by simplistic models for a much better reason: they are very aware that the act of building a model involves loss as well as gain. Africa isn't empty, but the act of making accurate maps can get you into the habit of imagining that it is. Model-building, especially in its early stages, involves the evolution of ignorance as well as knowledge; and someone with powerful intuition, with a deep sense of the complexities of reality, may well feel that from his point of view more is lost than is gained.
……We all think in simplified models, all the time. The sophisticated thing to do is not to pretend to stop, but to be self-conscious -- to be aware that your models are maps rather than reality.

If you look at the writing of anyone who claims to be able to write about social issues without stooping to restrictive modeling, you will find that his insights are based essentially on the use of metaphor. And metaphor is, of course, a kind of heuristic modeling technique.

In fact, we are all builders and purveyors of unrealistic simplifications. Some of us are self-aware: we use our models as metaphors. Others, including people who are indisputably brilliant and seemingly sophisticated, are sleepwalkers: they unconsciously use metaphors as models.


KRUGMAN, ECONOMICS NOBEL PRIZE WINNER 2008

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/dishpan.html