Food for thought, degree of risk, beyond the label.

In the last few days I’ve eaten out a couple of times, once in the evening, once at lunchtime. The evening meal was in a local restaurant that we’ve not visited for a good few years. The food was fine apart from one element of my starter. When the waitress asked was everything OK, I told her about the deficient element. She was very apologetic but afterwards I wondered if she had gone into the kitchen to tell the chef, and if so, what, if anything, he did to ensure that other diners didn’t have the same problem. There was certainly no feed-back to me.

The restaurant, although pleasant enough, somehow had the feeling that it hadn’t changed much over the years; to be honest it felt a little dated both in decor and the way the food was presented. There are so many contemporary restaurants around now that failure to move with the times is likely to lead to a loss of custom over time. Much the same applies to many other businesses.

By contrast, the lunchtime outing for a bar meal at an establishment no more than a couple of hundred yards from the first, was an altogether more positive experience. For a start the interior is contemporary and welcoming and the staff are smartly dressed in the modern idiom. Adjacent to us was a large table with a mix of adults, teens and a couple of babies. The babies were making quite a din and I was finding it quite hard to hear what my wife was saying. One of the waiters obviously spotted this and quietly asked if we would like to move to another table, which we did with his help. Full marks for observation and customer care.

The educational foundation Edge has warned of "academic snobbery" against vocational courses and, quite rightly points out that going on to study for a degree for its own sake is not always suitable for the careers that young people really want.

Edge claims that many parents are influenced by ingrained prejudices against vocational qualifications, and says, "… we know from employers that what is required from young people is real-world experience, practical skills and hard skills such as the ability to communicate and work in teams.”

That may be true but so many jobs are advertised as requiring a ‘degree or equivalent qualification’, which may lead to a superficial view that a degree is the only route to a ‘good job’. And just what is a good job? One that pays lots of money perhaps? Well yes, that’s quite handy but I think that many (most?) people would say that enjoying the job, job satisfaction, would rate higher. And if you enjoy your job you will almost certainly do it better. So there seems to be a real risk that employers and employees alike will miss out if academic qualifications are given undue weight when making decisions on recruitment and career paths respectively.

The proof that money is not all comes in the vast numbers of people involved in voluntary activities of one sort or another. The satisfaction of doing something worthwhile is the reward here, not financial gain. I am involved with the Prince’s Trust. The Trust has a slogan, ‘Look beyond the label’. In other words, look at the real person, who they are and what they can do rather than dismiss them at first sight because of their appearance, the way they speak or their qualifications, or apparent lack of.

Perhaps in the UK we have become too obsessed by labels, designer or otherwise. Maybe labels are a variation on the theme of ‘spin’ or ‘substance’.

David Wike