Is'nt this a sad reflection on todays employment methods. Most posts are part time or short contract agency. Very few "REAL JOBS" now as we have very few real trades left & are fast becoming a nation of IT workers with ever decreasing blue collar posts as we can't make it pay.
Sheffield Steel, Avista Polarit. Outo Kompo, Corus, Tata.....more redundancies?
Ship building, railways....What happened to the industries that put the "Great" into Britain?
We are now a nation of offices & retail parks. 
Yes, I have a few Steadfast screwdrivers I have been using for over 25 years. They were made in Sheffield and are great, almost indestructable. However the company who made them is no longer, they made them too good, not consumable items that wear out fast.
Re the blue collar jobs.... There are a lot of graduates in engineering who are good at programming etc, but haven't a clue at real engineering, eg noise filtering, how to get analogue and digital working well together, they rely on the PCB designer to make it all work, where in actual fact he hasn't got a clue either. That's where the old timer, ( like me ! ) is pretty useful. If you want to make things work you need experience of how it all works to make it happen.
A recent case, a measuring system used a 12bit A/D converter, worked fine, about 2mV of system noise so the software guys had to drop a couple of bits of resolution cause of the noise level. A replacement was sought, along came Designer who claimed to understand all this stuff, designed a replacement using a 16bit converter. Now using 16 bits, 1 bit is 60uV (very very small !), and totally swamped by the background noise of 2mV which he didn't improve, so software had to drop even more bits of resolution so no improvement, and they have had to pay an expensive salary for 3 years. Management is not happy.
However me, with my understanding of noise levels and power distribution will just about save the day, and keep us in business a bit longer.
We have to support our basic industries, we have given away so many, its a crime. Support, nurture, grow like a seed.......
Ken