Good times, bad times? Time alone will tell

So for once, the bookmakers failed to cash in on Christmas. Those of you who fancy a flutter on a few flakes of snow falling on the Met Office roof on Christmas Day were amply rewarded last month. Such predictive powers would be most welcome just now as we enter another new year. The only racing certainties for 1997 are that there will be a general election - and that the bookies will win back their losses by the end of the year.

Whatever its outcome though, the election cannot come soon enough. Are we really experiencing the start of a sustained economic upturn, or a brief blowout before the belt-tightening begins again? Only time will tell, of course, as it will the make-up of the next government.

But, whichever party (or even, perhaps, partnership?) is returned victorious, there will still be a number of perennial problems facing the process engineering profession. As we report on page 7 this month, one of these is simply how to keep the flow of fresh talent coming through the universities and out into industry.

One of the main employers of chemical and process engineers is, for obvious reasons, the chemical industry itself. According to a recent Chemical Industries Association survey of its member companies, the industry's demand for chemical engineering graduates has shown a steady increase over the past three years. But the CIA says it has detected a trend towards `a gradual tightening of the graduate market' as more of its member companies begin to report shortages of the types of graduates they are looking for - in particular, chemical engineers.

To some extent, it could be argued that the chemical industry has only itself to blame for such a shortfall. Notoriously cyclical in its own business and recruitment patterns, it can hardly expect universities - let alone the schools that supply the universities with their students - always to be in phase with the ever-changing supply and demand situation for graduates.

But such has been the case for decades now and we can expect little to change. Even now there are probably school careers advisers picking up on the current demand for chemical engineers and pointing their A-level pupils in the direction of one or other of the excellent university chemical engineering departments (and, despite those departments' own criticism of their recent teaching quality assessments - see page 7 - their quality is not in question). But what will be the demand for those earnest engineers of the future in four years time?