Making every job professional is unsustainable

I had a very interesting discussion with someone about this and would be interested to hear other opinions on this.

Community development, social care, nursing, social work, has all become professions ...as these jobs become more professional salaries go up thus making the provision of services more expensive and this is an unsustainable way of delivering services.

Can professional care be provided by lower paid non qualified staff ?

For example the job I do.. to do it today you have to have a degree but when I started out it was a one year course.

Daegerty

Soon you'll have to do a degree and mandatory health & safety course to be a fecking shop assistant. Such is regulatory creep

Make a list of instances where untrained shop assistants screwed up and you'll convince a lot of people a lengthy training session is needed for that type of job. Maybe a year or two in college.

mikemac

Nursing used to be a vocation.

Now it's a degree course and graduate salaries are expected.
And there are care assistants to do a lot of the menial work.

Was it realy much worse in the old days when the nurses did all the graft and a matron ruled over them?

A lot of clipboard carriers around while others do the real work

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Denerick

Nurses don't actually do the grunt work, that is largely done by orderlies.

I also defy anyone to claim that a pyschiatric or general medicine nurse is anything other than highly specialised and supremely patient.

silverharp

the other angle is too many college courses for professions that used to have an apprentiship model. In essence dead cost is heaped on the economy and students are either trained for jobs that dont exist or training is more expensive then it could or ought to have been.

Kosseegan

Jobs change over time. some become simpler and others more complex.
Printing is now considerable different from the business it was 50 years ago. Nursing is also different. There are new treatments, new diagnostic equipment and many new drugs. Student nurses making beds are not going to acquire the knowledge needed in the more clinical aspects of the work. Some countries have also found conscript armies to be progressively less useful. The length of time taken to train a soldier in all of the necessary skills now required is longer than the length of time a conscript serves.

miec

Personally I feel that positions of community care should come with extensive training, much more so than a business as you are dealing with people. I worked as a care assistant with people who had learning difficulties and I was not trained properly in how to deal with a number of situations. I received 2.50 (sterling) an hour and yes whilst I did making of meals, manual stuff, I also had to do lifting, bathing, assistant with health care issues and if the residents were upset or angry that was challenging to deal with. I feel people should have qualifications in community care.

The same goes for working with children etc. It is nuts to put someone with minimal skills and low pay to do a job with such responsibility.

Nolanger

Taxi drivers will need a bleedin' degree next! We've replaced people with an aptitude and passion for their job with over-educated and mindless drones who think they're suitable for a profession because they studied it at college.

I think people are missing my point a little ....People should be trained for what ever job they do, get good comprehensive training and have ongoing training most especially in any sort of care work but that is not the same as the work becoming a profession.

One of my daughters is a nurse she works in the UK in the unit she works in there are a few nurses and a lot of HCA ( health car assistances ) the HCA are trained they wouldn't get the job otherwise. The HCA are paid apx £14,000

To pay for service in a sustainable manner your probably need a large amount of support workers/ assistances who will be paid at that level and a much smaller amount of professional staff.

sambuka41

mariaalice wrote: »

One of my daughters is a nurse she works in the UK in the unit she works in there are a few nurses and a lot of HCA ( health car assistances ) the HCA are trained they wouldn't get the job otherwise. The HCA are paid apx £14,000

Thats it though, they are moving towards all care assistants in the country having at least FETAC level 5 in health care skills. Its a one year course. This is for a job that my mother started when she was 12 years old (in the 70's, not that I am condoning child labour!!! ).

Training is important, to be trained in manual handling, first aid, dementia care (if needed) but I personally don't see the need for a year long course. (I have worked as a carer and a manager of carers, and some of the best people i managed didnt have this qualification)

maninasia

mariaalice wrote: »

I had a very interesting discussion with someone about this and would be interested to hear other opinions on this.

Community development, social care, nursing, social work, has all become professions ...as these jobs become more professional salaries go up thus making the provision of services more expensive and this is an unsustainable way of delivering services.

Can professional care be provided by lower paid non qualified staff ?

For example the job I do.. to do it today you have to have a degree but when I started out it was a one year course.

This is a major problem , at a certain point the return of higher educated staff but higher pay drops as the number of people to administer the service quickly drops.

You can see a similar problem in general medicine, where one of the major reasons to not see a doctor or visit a hospital is cost, the cost is due to over regulation and overpay. Ironically less qualified doctors on less pay may give a better service to the broad swathe of society. But you won't ever get these people to admit it.

I live in a country that is an 'emerging market' but the services in general are FAR superior to Ireland even though the education level is probably lower (although there is competition to get higher education too). The main reason that services are better here though is lower pay at all levels meaning they can hire more staff per 'customer' served.

Gilda Fortune

I agree. The job I have now i worked my way up from a production floor in a factory to working in the quality department. I know my job inside out. But nowadays you need a degree to do my job. If i ever wanted to move job my 10 years experience would mean nothing in place of a graduate.
I think its wrong and ultimately cannot work.

I see so many warehouse jobs nowadays and they want people with fork lift and reach licence. Im my day (old or what!) a company took you on and sent you on the day course for your licence. These licences have to be renewed every few years. Its so unfair to workers. a man might have years and years of experience in a warehouse, be out of work and his licence is out of date.

i5kra

For my own tuppence worth it seems as if having a degree nowadays is equivalent of having your leaving cert 20+ years ago. An associated problem is that its in universities financial interests to create all sorts of new degree courses for subjects that were traditionally a vocational subject.

That was fine in the good times when there was money floating around but I'm not sure that kind of university-model will survive the recession. Going to university is going to become a very expensive proposition for everybody so there will be a lot more focus on the prestige courses or the ones that relate to something that will lead directly to a job.

That's my opinion anyway!

maninasia

Unfortunately you may be right, if we follow the US and UK example, with the prestige and government jobs going to graduates of exclusive and very expensive universities, but then if you even the less exclusive universities are getting more expensive.
There are a few reasons for this trend in my opinion

-Almost everybody has a degree these days, if you don't have one it sticks out, as you said it's the new LC
-Since most people have a degree they look for a Masters or something else to stand out
-HR departments are lazy and use 'advanced education' requirements to abritrarily cut down the number of potential job candidates to be screened
-The false idea of the 'knowledge economy' meaning everybody should be more knowledgeable instead of being more skilled, more enthusiastic harder working, suitable personality, more experienced etc etc

There is a big debate in the US now as to whether going to college is worth it, their averages debt is 23,500 USD (which doesn't sound like a lot to be honest compared to earning power there), some owe a lot more than that.

I and many others don't agree with this constant educational arms race but it's like fighting the tide, if that's what society decides is required what can you do? It is wasteful of resources and time overall.

i5kra

I'd agree with you there - the price of university education is going to go up and up. Just look at the UK now where the universities are allowed charge £9000 fees per year (not to mention all the other costs of keeping you in baked beans and the occasional alcoholic beverage) so that has to effect the numbers who will apply for courses. University education is going to revert back to the days when you had to have rich parents to afford it.

I know somebody from the US doing a Phd (in art history) in Dublin and she was saying that in order to pay for it she had taken out a student loan for $150,000! Insane money! And what guarantee do you have that at the end of it you'll get a high-paying job that will pay it back? In terms of art history, not much I'd imagine.

The fact is that just because you have a degree/masters/phd in something does not necessarily mean that you will be good at that job in the real world!