Dyson opens Britain’s first degree where students get paid

I think that's overstating it, there's a lot of engineering in the UK. It just has a very low media profile, because it either has a foreign name on the product (Nissan!) or doesn't sell to consumers.

A surprisingly large amount of it is in really unglamorous buildings in industrial estates outside cities other than London. Since the media have largely stopped bothering to leave the M25, it's invisible.

(I have a pet theory based on the car industry that the really toxic thing is British labour relations; there are successful small British companies, and successful large plants with foreign owners, but all the British-managed mass-employment industries collapsed in strikes and/or were looted by the directors like MG Rover.)

In fact what he is setting up is very much similar to the German Mittelstand apprenticeship model; however to get similar results requires managers to change their ways, most apprenticeship trained staff in Mittelstand companies have a turnover of 2.7% (rather than up to 30% in entry level employees in US / UK).[0] This means that managers need to realise that you need good, technically solid training, and interesting work for these employees, a defined career path, and persistence and engagement rather than a fire them if I think they're even slightly off / not a good culture fit. A good cultural fit typically requires training too! Think of medieval type apprenticeships; not just on the job training but also training in how to be a productive, respectable adult.

If the Dyson IoT does these things that other employers claim they want (soft skills etc) but aren't willing to train or pay for then Dyson's new venture will probably succeed handsomely in the long run.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21606834-many-countri...

EDIT: fixed typos

That's really confusing cause and effect. For some sectors we rely on 'Europe' but the cause is that talented individuals are often discouraged from training or staying in the UK. Nurses are a prime example of this issue

Do they also provide training for breaking into sawmills, stealing industrial designs, applying them to vacuum cleaners and patenting them so you can accumulate wealth thanks to a state granted monopoly?

http://machinedesign.com/news/industrial-design-design-dyson... :

> As it happened, Dyson was also having suction problems at the factory which made his Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow he invented that uses a ball instead of a wheel. There, overspray of an epoxy powder was collected on an 8 8-ft cloth screen in front of a gigantic fan with a three-phase motor — a sort-of giant vacuum cleaner. Production had to stop every hour to brush out the screen and gather the powder for reuse. Otherwise, the screen would clog and powder would fly all over the factory.

> The spray-equipment maker said large industrial users collected airborne debris in a cyclone. The cyclone, it turned out, was a 30-ft-high cone that spun dust out of the air using centrifugal force — the kind of thing you might see on top of a saw mill.

> Under cover of darkness, Dyson went to a nearby sawmill, climbed the fence, and “surveyed at close hand the gigantic symbol of my future.” He made some sketches and climbed all over it to learn how it worked, what its proportions were, and what it was made of.

> The next day, Dyson and his workers welded a 30-ft cyclone together from sheets of steel and attached it to the roof. He “gleefully” tore the cloth screen from the opening of the duct and started the conveyor. The overspray “went straight into the gaping hole, up the [duct work] and around the walls at the top of the cyclone, spiraling down through the inverted cone to be collected by a bag at the bottom, while the air escaped into the sky. Production went on and on, with no stoppages until the end of the day,” says Dyson.

> The similarity between ripping off the cloth filter and tossing out a vacuum-cleaner bag was obvious. It also occurred to him there was “no reason why it shouldn’t work in miniature, using a cyclone about the size of, say, a Perrier bottle.” That night, Dysonmodeled a foot-long version of the cyclone out of cardboard and duct tape. He covered the large end, leaving a hole in the top for the escaping air. Then, he attached a short length of hose to the discharge hole of the machine (where the bag had been) and connected it to the top of the cyclone, which was fixed to the shaft of the cleaner. The world’s only bagless vacuum cleaner worked flawlessly.

Academic teaching organisations too, for that matter. It's quite common for a college to also offer some degree-level courses that are accredited by a local university.

(Note to non-Brits: "college" in the UK is mostly for lower-level and vocational courses, it's not a synonym for university like in the US)