AN advertisement in the Guernsey Press for a trainee clown got me thinking about the issue of employment prospects in the islands. Anyone venturing out into the clowning business must have been heartened by the ad in Guernsey, but jobs are pretty scarce elsewhere.

The announcement that a major bank plans to shed a third of its staff in the next 30 months obviously came as a surprise to some people. I don’t know why. I’m surprised there haven’t been more similar announcements. It’s not just the recession – although that doesn’t help – there has been a restructuring going on in the banking industry for some time and this has just been hastened by the global crisis.

The more relevant indicator for Jersey will be how quickly those 180 staff find alternative employment, if in fact they can. A lot will depend on what kind of jobs are going and the skills of the people the bank believes are surplus to requirements.

The redundancies announced by a major law firm recently were much more surprising, but I’m told that most of the staff there have already found other work.

So it’s by no means all gloom, and the restructuring affecting Jersey is nothing compared to some other jurisdictions, notably the City of London. The States are also beginning to move now that they believe they have a crisis on their hands, so those put out of work will receive plenty of attention.

In the meantime, it would be wise to learn from the experiences we’re going through at the moment.

The striking thing about this crisis is that everyone has predicted it. No they didn’t predict the credit crunch (at least not many of them), nor did they predict the near collapse of the banking system. But as long as I’ve been reporting on Jersey’s finance industry (which is now quite a long time), people have been predicting the imminent demise of the sector and the rapid departure of all the banks, investment companies and other financial institutions.

It’s self-evident that hasn’t happened, but there have been many rapid changes over the years so that the finance sector we had 20 or 30 years ago bears very little resemblance to what we have now. That is after all Jersey’s strength. It’s been able to adapt as markets have adapted. No doubt it will continue to do so, but it’s not getting any easier.

I’m also not a believer in the widely held belief that the finance industry is not just one industry, but a series of diversified economic activities. The theory is that there is therefore no single event which could trigger the demise of the whole industry. I’m not so sure. There hasn’t been so far, and I don’t see anything on the immediate horizon – certainly not the international rhetoric about tax havens – that could result in such cataclysm. But I wouldn’t like to bet on the next five years.

That’s quite a long way away and conveniently outside of the political timeframe of many States members. And hence we don’t worry about it.

The end result could be that we will eventually be caught out with all of our golden eggs in the proverbial finance sector basket when the crunch finally comes.

The answer to our problem is as my old mate Baden Powell used to say: ‘Be prepared’. Actually BP wasn’t a close mate, but I was a Scout so I do feel a certain empathy with him.

So far Jersey has been unprepared for many of the dramatic changes that have come along, and it’s something of a minor miracle that the results haven’t been more disastrous. We’ve been very good at maintaining and fighting for the status quo, and even pretty good at adapting when the status quo is upset, but we’ve not been any good at contingency planning or answering the big question ‘what if?’ That’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s what government should be trying to do.

As far as the economy is concerned, the answer often revolves around the availability and development of skills and local experience. It’s absolutely crucial in helping us to distinguish ourselves from the competition, and preparing us to meet not only the demands of current markets but of adapting to a changing world.

I have no inside knowledge so I don’t know what kind of jobs will be lost at the large bank mentioned above, but I can’t see them getting rid of people who could make a significant impact on their bottom line.

The jobs that will go will be the jobs that can be done anywhere. While many of the current postholders could well have considerable skills that can be transferred either to vacancies elsewhere in the organisation or to other employers, I suspect quite a few will not. They will have to be retrained or given further skills to remain in gainful employment.

That’s fair enough because few people predicted the severity of the downturn, so there’s a lot of firefighting to be done.

But the problem is that all we seem to concentrate on is firefighting. Where is the long-term strategy for the development of skills in Jersey that will be vital for future success, regardless of any crisis?

Well we now have a high-powered Skills Executive in place that’s supposed to do the trick. But we haven’t heard anything from them yet. Like aliens from another planet, I’m sure they exist, but there’s not much evidence.

Well that’s hardly surprising really. They have an enormous job to do and they have only just been established. So what can you expect? Unfortunately that proves my point. We were not foresighted enough to have established a Skills Executive, or something similar, years ago.

So here we are with a new organisation that not only has to grapple with the long-term problems of developing skills in the Island, but also has to deal with the fall-out of the recession. They are not miracle-workers. While undoubtedly they will have some immediate impact, it will be years before their efforts bear fruit.

So why weren’t they in place years ago, so that by now we would be ready to tackle the odd recession and be in a better long-term competitive position? It’s not as though the importance of developing skills locally has been a recent phenomenon. We’ve known for decades that it’s vital. We’ve even had several stabs at trying to solve the problem, but basically it has not been given the priority it needs.

Some ministers will no doubt blame the old system of government for a failure to grasp the nettle, but I think that’s just a cop-out. Given the will and determination, it could have been done even under the old committee structure.

What really needs to happen is for the States to spend less time strategising and more time tackling real, practical problems. It’s all very well talking about skills in the context of a Strategic Plan, but it doesn’t help a Trainee Clown find a job.
Peter Body is editor of
Business Brief magazine