Once More With Feeling

I had some decent ideas for this week’s blog:

An impending trip to Crete was sparking off some ideas about the Bronze Age, Europe’s first civilisation and a variation on the “Cretan urn” gag.

A trip to Edinburgh to see the European Championships Diving Finals finished up with a wander around the Festival street venues with #2 Son and observations along the liners of however odd my trade may be it doesn’t involve juggling knives whilst riding a unicycle and wearing a funny hat to make a living. Well, not every day anyway.

But I scrapped all that and decided to write about Brexit instead. Actually what I decided to write about was blaming external issues for problems of your own making.

For my UK readers (LinkedIn says that’s about 60% of you) you need to know that my personal attitude to the whole EU departure business is essentially “meh”. Yeah, it’s a pain but that’s life – get on with it. Some of you offshored your manufacturing to China 10 years ago and laid off experienced loyal staff – those guys had a really crappy time – your likely experience of Brexit is nothing compared to their experience of not having a job for a year.

To my non-UK, EU based readers (that’s about 30% of you) you’ve guessed it, my opinion is still “meh” because obviously you’ll never work in the UK or trade with us ever again the way you don’t trade with or visit or work in the USA, Australia, Canada…oh, hang on…

To everyone else generally, “meh”.

In essence an old whinge reared its head in a newspaper article this week.  The complaint goes, “As a company I really need senior experienced technical management with particular skills but I can no longer attract or retain them in the UK because of Brexit”.

(Those of you outside the UK might want to walk the dog or go down the pub now)

One more time then. Brexit is not your problem. Your problem is that you’ve wildly overestimated the ability of your “brand” to attract talent (you’re not Google) and wildly underestimated the following:

• The salary package required to persuade someone to relocate their entire family, put their children into an appropriate school, persuade their spouse to stop working as a lawyer (because their qualifications aren’t recognised here), buy a house, connect to the internet and to indemnify them against your business changing its mind and moving everything to Texas and leaving them jobless somewhere they don’t like

Also one more time. I’ve been solving (well, mitigating) this problem for 17 years and I can solve it for you. It involves talking to me (which oddly some of you find hard to do) and being realistic about the art of the possible.

I’m heading for Crete now – I’ll answer your emails when I get back on Tuesday.