Our jobs and retail conundrum.

"Scoop" - a very good digger.

I like to think that I am a good “digger”, not may I add in the garden, as most things I plant unfortunately die. The green fingers in the Garland Clan definitely belong to the fairer sex – I could not even grow my GIY garlic!

What I mean is that when I wish to write about a particular topic I do my very best to dig out some research or at the very least I look for some statistical information that will help get my writing juices flowing. This in turn allows me the time to bash away on my keyboard, time and time again, so that I now really enjoy expressing my views and opinions though the medium of print.

I regularly use a number of reference sites, on the old Interweb, and the Central Statistic Office (CSO) site was used to last week garner some interesting statistics about the regional variations in a measure called Gross Added Value (GAV). This measures “the difference between production value and intermediate consumption and represents the value added by the firm.” This is a great site for statistics but I do feel that it is overly complicated to use and maybe this is deliberate so as to dissuade people from engaging.

This GAV figure is measured in Euro and the state’s average for 2012 (the last statistical data point) is €34,308, Dublin measured €51,839 and the South East came in at €23,588. Quite a significant variation then across the country, as you would expect. The South East’s high for GAV was back in 2007 when the figure was at €29,884, but this was still significantly below the state average for that year of €39,522.

This GAV figures reflects the low wages economies across the South East which should, in theory, make the SE a more competitive inward investment option.

However, a multi-national will not invest into a region based on low wages alone, it may need a specific skill set or a multi-faceted spread of skills that will ultimately help generate profit to offset what would be a multimillion Euro investment. The stakes are very high!

The low GAV also backs up the statistics that show, right across the SE, there is significantly lower disposable income for our very localised economy. After all if you have only €50 to spend at the end of the week you will spend €50 and if you have €300 the difference this makes is to our economy is considerable. This much lower disposable income directly influences the retailing opportunities in our City Centre and across the whole SE region.

Our current conundrum is this.

To get a better retail mix and a better retail branding in the City we need to see more money being spent in our local economy. But we cannot increase this spend until such times as we attract better higher paid jobs. But attracting those better higher paid jobs will affect our GAV and possibly makes us even more unattractive to future investment.

It actually is a very difficult set of balls to be juggling.

But the balls have been juggled now for many, many years and yet we appear to be no further forward in actually making Waterford and the SE an important place for increased FDI and other indigenous investment streams.

We can only improve the Status Quo by radically looking at just how attractive we are for investment, because the route we have currently chosen is clearly not working. The City, County and Region need to look for far-reaching solutions that will make the SE THE most attractive place to invest.

 

We need to be better than every other region full stop!

Perhaps one quick immediate solution is to stop looking at commercial rates as a simple cash cow and start actually incentivising investment through a lower rate structure and essentially reducing the cost of being in business in Waterford.

If we do this the future statistics will show that in 2016 was in fact a benchmark year, a year when we put Waterford back on the investment map. New foundations are needed so let us start building them now.

No pressure, no diamonds!

As our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews prepare to sit Junior and Leaving Certificate exams we can all, I am sure, remember just how we felt as the exams deadline approached. We can all remember fretting and worrying about whether or not all of the information we had stored and crammed into every corner of our brain could be regurgitated in the right order for the specific questions we were answering.

I know that some thirty odd years ago I was studying hard in my bedroom room in Pitlessie Village, just a few miles from my secondary school, Bell Baxter High School, in Cupar, in a county called Fife. I very quickly realised that I was not the brightest match in the box and that if I was to succeed in a future life I would have to work very, very hard and more importantly I would have to find a study system that worked for me and the limitations I had personally identified in the various subjects I was studying.

Strangely enough, the subject that I found the hardest was English and those closest to me will know that in my whole life I have probably read, cover to cover, just a handful of books. Such was my inability to like this most necessary of subjects that my parents invested in tutoring for me and by some minor miracle, and divine intervention,  I managed to pass, with a sufficient Higher Grade, that I was able to go further on to third level education.

Little did I know that in my future career and life I would need English probably more than any other subject I studied?

Despite having an almost complete hatred of the whole subject of English I now find myself writing more and more in my everyday life and I owe a very big thank you to both my parents for persevering and investing their time and energy in me, to ensure I passed my English exams.

As those nearest to us prepare to go through the very same exam pressures I know that we as parents must give the necessary support, encouragement and guidance to allow our children to perform to the very best of their abilities. We must become coaches and perhaps more importantly mentors to them so that they know they are not alone in the difficult journey they are about to embark on. As exam mentors we need to be cognisant of the fact that we all learn and study in different ways and our individual children will differ in the way they study, the way they retain information and the way they set down that information on an exam paper.

Luckily, today’s children are assessed throughout the school year and your performance is not all based around just one examination. We all know that a one-off examination will suit some children but it will not necessarily suit other children. The fact the children are now continually assessed will bode well for future careers in the workplace where we are continually assessed and benchmarked. The ability to continually perform and improve is a hard lesson to learn but a necessary lesson our children must learn if they are to continually improve.

In a commercial environment we must continually seek to improve our performance and we must repeatedly seek to be ahead of our competition in terms of sales, marketing and the communication of those messages. Failure to strive for betterment will undoubtedly lead to the failure of a company or a brand. The pressures we put ourselves under will either make or break us in business, and how we individually cope and manage with those pressures does I believe go all the way back to our teenage school days and how we learned to cope with the pressures of examinations.

I know myself that I had to put a very precise structure in place in order for me to study efficiently, and this worked for me and has now given me the discipline to work on numerous projects and programmes all at once. This early study structure has also given me the ability to jump from one task to another at the flick of a switch. I believe we now call this multitasking and despite what some of the fairer sex may say, men are equally good at multitasking we just need to put a structure to the tasks at hand.

In fact, my own study plans varied wildly from those of my sister who seemed to get by in all of her exams by reading and studying the weekly “Jackie” comic, published by D C Thomson of Dundee. I did pick up the odd copy to check what study tips were contained therein. But there were none and I could never understand how Linzi passed her exams on the back of studying just the “Jackie” magazine! Perhaps someday she will tell me?

The pain and concern all our children are going through this exam time will stand them in good stead for third level education and their future careers. The more, as parents, we can relate to the fact that we too suffered, panicked and bombed some of our exams will help them through this tough period of their lives. We must find a way of relating our own experiences back to them at the right time and in the right place.

As we progress through life and if we are lucky enough to want to become senior managers, team managers, supervisors, CEO’s or influencers then we need to remember back to our days of study when we looked to our parents for encouragement and guidance. Those, like me, lucky enough to have parents who were enthusiastically involved in our future career outlook should remember just how we felt when we were encouraged, mentored and praised for the work and effort we had put into our study.

In business we all must remember that the right encouragement, at the right time, gets a much better positive reaction than simply shouting and swearing at your workforce and employees. Good “bosses” know when to say thank you, know when to put their arm around you, know when to give the hairdryer treatment and they instinctively know when to push or hold back as they have experienced it all themselves.

I would wage a bet that the best bosses are in general those who are less gifted, those who found exams very hard and are those who had to find a structured study plan. After all pressure is really only for turbos and tyres!

And finally always remember, “No pressure, no diamonds!”