Airline pilots have never required a university degree. They qualify through vocational training, usually through an employer, which they can commence as school leavers. One-third are ex-military.
Yet pilots enjoyed a social status comparable to surgeons and judges when they had an equivalent salary. Their status has only declined with a downward pressure on pilots’ wages around the world.
Although experienced captains are still extremely well paid, the starting salary and prospects for a first officer in the UK are now similar to those of a teacher. Terms and conditions are considerably worse - many budget airlines put new pilots on zero-hours contracts. In the United States, at least prior to Covid, such pilots had begun comparing themselves to commercial drivers.
This is a missing insight from the education debate in Northern Ireland.
Research commissioned by Stormont’s Department for the Economy, reported by the BBC this week, has found an “enduring stigma” around vocational qualifications and vocational training in general. Further education colleges are seen as a “Plan B” by young people due to a “culturally perpetuated stigma of failing to get into university.”
One agrifood employer accused his industry of “academic snobbery” against the very qualifications its own staff require.
Although this is a familiar conversation, the snobbery is not quite as enduring as endless complaints about it assume. The social standing of jobs and routes into those jobs is always changing according to economic and social trends.
Policing is a striking example in Northern Ireland. Joining the RUC had a high cachet among my teenage peers not just because of the courage and commitment involved but because you could start at 18 and immediately buy a four-bedroom detached house in Moira.
You can stun anyone my age by telling them a PSNI student officer makes £21,000.
As some vocations fall, others rise. Technical jobs in green energy are both highly prized and well paid. The great cliché of the debate on vocational education is the middle-class parent pontificating about how more young people ought to take up a trade, yet who would be aghast if their own offspring declared they wanted to be an electrician.
However, the horror genuinely abates if a youngster wants to be a windmill engineer. This is considered fashionable, admirable and somehow completely different to installing equipment on top of an electricity pylon or a telegraph pole. A wind turbine technician in Northern Ireland makes on average £28,500, which can double with overtime. The relevant qualification is a City and Guilds level 3 NVQ diploma in electrical power engineering.
In short, the social status of a career path tracks wages. Raising its status might involve more than good pay but good pay is the essential factor.
Whether the path starts at college or university is in many ways a distraction. It would help if the paths were not laid out as mutually exclusive, closing off future career choices. Barriers have been put up between progressing from college to university as both types of institution increasingly see themselves competing for applicants and funding. An engineering student, for example, will be told their HND at college is equivalent to two years of a degree, yet it may not get them into third year at university, nor can they start a degree from scratch, as their first two years of funding have gone.
Meanwhile, universities are trying to poach young people off colleges with ‘foundation courses’ that can only lead on to that university’s degrees.
The Department for the Economy controls colleges, universities and student finance. There is a great deal it can do to address these problems but ultimately Stormont needs a broader strategy to simply raise wages in sectors struggling for qualified staff.
There would be a lot less snobbery about agrifood if most of its jobs did not pay at or around the minimum wage. While employers might say they cannot afford it, the truth is Northern Ireland can no longer afford to be stuck in a trap of low pay and low productivity. Higher wages force firms to innovate, as has happened in America, where automation is making inroads into meat processing and other food production line jobs performed manually here.
In England, automated greenhouses for fruit and vegetables are attracting huge industry interest and government support, due to the loss of seasonal workers following Brexit.
It would be condescending to pretend picking cabbages could ever be a desirable, well-paid work. But greenhouse robot technicians really could be the next windmill engineers.
