Ann Silver

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.71.36

Research by the Sector Skills Council for Engineering, Manufacturing & Technology (SEMTA) has revealed that two out of five UK bioscience companies have hard-to-fill vacancies and one in five organisations admit skills gaps in their current workforce.

There are concerns that the skills gap will lead to the loss of Britain’s status as one of the world’s leading centres for bioscience research and development. UK bioscience revenues alone are worth £3.3 billion per annum, and the sector employs 55000 people.

In response to the skills shortfall, a range of bioscience companies, trade associations, government, unions, professional bodies, qualification authorities, awarding bodies and education/training providers, working with SEMTA, have produced an industry standard set of competencies that form the basis for job design, recruitment, training and performance assessment. The new standards will also provide a framework for organisations to fill key vacancies by up-skilling their current bioscience workforce.

The 10 year skills action plan for the sector was launched by the Rt Hon John Denham MP, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills at the House of Commons on 6 February.

Speaking at the launch, John Denham said ‘This sector-wide commitment to skills will do much to enhance the UK’s position as a leading centre for research and development. I am particularly pleased that the plan emphasises partnership between employers and education and training providers. This will be instrumental both in promoting the sector to young people and in equipping graduates with the high-level skills they need to contribute to the success of our bioscience industries.’

The unit of absolute certainty

At one Physiological Society Dinner B Delisle Burns pointed out that few physiologists have given their names to apparatus or units. He contrasted this with eponymous surgeons who live on in perpetuity simply for adding an extra tooth to a pair of forceps. He then suggested some new, physiologist-based units, including the particularly apt ‘Feldberg’ as the unit of absolute certainty. Pedro Guertzenstein, one of Feldberg’s co-workers, and I had tried to pinpoint precisely the area in the ventral brain stem involved in the maintenance of arterial blood pressure (see Feldberg & Guertzenstein, 1972). Various experiments allowed us to localise this area to the parvicellular part of the lateral reticular nucleus but we were cagey about its dimensions, using phrases like ‘about’ and ‘not wider than’ (Guertzenstein & Silver, 1974). Not so Feldberg who, in one of his Sherrington Lectures, firmly says ‘not larger than 1.5 mm2 ’.

References

Feldberg, W S (1982). The Sherrington Lectures XVI Fifty years on: looking back on some developments in neurohumoral physiology. Liverpool University Press.

Feldberg W & Guertzenstein P (1972). J Physiol 224, 83–103.

Guertzenstein P & Silver A (1974). J Physiol 242, 489–503.

The Bioscience Sector Skills Agreement is available at: www.semta.org.uk