JOB HUNTING SIR,—In connection with the subject of job-hunting as
it affects ex-Service men and women, there is one aspect of the labour situation in relation to the Services which I consider has received too little attention. That is, the direct link-up between the type of work young men and women in the Forces want to do after their release, compared with the type of work which is, in fact, available for them. In other words—" matching- up" the demand and supply in the labour market. A questionnaire on the lines of the "Gallup Poll" idea might well have been instituted in all the Services months ago, for the purpose of assessing the main lines of thought regarding their post-war work amongst soldiers, sailors, airmen and women of the auxiliary services. The results thus obtained could have been invaluable both to Re-settlement Officers in the Services and to the Ministry of Labour itself, and might have formed a basis of liaison between the two—a liaison which, in my experience, has been sadly lacking.
That this type of -census gives interesting and frequently startling information I can vouch for from personal experience as an ex-officer of one of the Women's Services. During my final months of service, I worked in a unit with well over 1,000 women. The re-settlement officer decided to take a census, purely for her main information and guidance, to discover each woman's post-war working plans. To go into the results in any detail here is impossible—but two figures are worth quoting. In answer to the question: "What type of work would you prefer to do on leaving the Service?" about 25 per cent. of the girls concerned stated: " Secretarial work "—and only approximately .8 per cent, voted for nursing! There is no need to emphasise the discrepancy thus demon- strated between supply and demand (incidentally, would-be domestic workers were also conspicuous by their rarity). It seems obvious that had the Ministry of Labour informed the Services, as soon as possible after YE Day, of the main trends of work likely to be available to Class A releases, a great deal of individual frustration and many thwarted plans might have been avoided.
Now, however, it is apparent that only by a somewhat wasteful process of painful experience will many ex-Service women finally come to realise that the country's labour requirements are still of more importance than their individual tastes as far as work is concerned. Presumably a similar process will operate for the men, too. I believe that a census was taken, with a view to setting up some sort of National Labour Register of workers about four years ago—but no practical results seem to have emerged from that, and the fact remains that four-years-old conclusions are of little use in settling current labour problems. The gap between potential workers and potential occupations remains a wide one—and it is all the more regrettable since, with a little imaginative co-operation between Ministry of Labour and Services, it might have been reasonably
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