29th April 2009, 12:01 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by drpeterwardle
What the job survey shows in that smaller companies are now affected by the down turn and there is a skill shortage in people who do DBAs and building recording - the very start of the archaeological/building process and that the people who do post excavation specialist work are less affected.
How serious a problem is this?
Interesting survey. I would have liked to see real numbers for the Skills Loss survey, as well as ranking 1, 2 or 3.
Smaller companies may appear to be more affected this quarter as they were masked by several huge lay-offs at larger units in previous quarters? I haven't looked closely at the figures so may be wrong!
Is there actually a skill shortage though? Or is the survey not asking whether they have 'lost skills', ie laid off staff working in these areas. I don't think that is the same as suddenly having a skills shortage. If there's no work for them to do, there's no need for the skills. This may lead to a skills shortage in any upturn, but that is completely different. And as the survey says, these 'skills losses' are exactly where they would be expected.
Archaeology goes in ups and downs all the time, what we have now is a deep and general 'down' in most areas, after a historic 'up'. The high allowed people to stay in archaeology for longer than normally the case, so we will see a higher than usual number of archaeologists leaving the profession. Some will come back, some won't, many would have left this disfunctional poorly paid profession anyway. The high drop out rate in archaeologists is there and always has been. This constant loss of skills has always existed. Is it really any different now?