I agree entirely with what you are saying.
I believe the culture in this country has been created by the government and schools. The careers advice appears to be 'Leave school, go to university, gain a degree and when you have the piece of paper you can be a brain surgeon CEO earning as much as you like'
We have a number of graduates, I have had some of them working on a program that I have been leading. One of them is very good and really keen to learn, the majority seem to have an attitude that they know better and are assigned to bring value with their superior qualifications. The 'attitude' that they are above the basics, means they will never learn the basic engineering skills.
Some of these graduates like the ones I mentioned in their 20's and 30's with degrees are almost unemployable, but again due to our work with the government the company needs to have lots of chartered engineers with masters degrees or phd on the books.
We find these highly qualified engineers usually end up with tasks that are minimum risk. One of them has recently been promoted to principle engineer, I would actually question the term engineer being used in his job title. He was very embarrassed when he told me of his promotion, his first words were 'don't laugh'
Business in this country especially engineering is in a very screwed up state.
