Over the last few days I have been asking people the question: “What are the top 5 skills you look for in a software developer?” in preparation for my talk at unConference 2009 in Singapore in two weeks time. I have been gathering the results together in some sort of draft diagram and they are available here. I would really welcome any comments and suggestions for improvement.

Being in Singapore at the moment and not being fed UK news for the last six months gives me a slightly different view of the Global Economic Crisis.

What is becoming clear from my simplistic understanding of economics is that there are two types of countries in this crisis; ones with borrowings and ones with savings.

Singapore had a surplus before the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Although Singapore went into a recession it was in a stronger position to recover well.  Since then it has continued to built a surplus until the current financial crisis. To me this is like someone loosing their job but finding a new one quite quickly and thinking; “that is a relief from now on I’m am going to be careful with my money and build up some savings in case this happens again”.

The UK however has not experienced a recession since the early 1990s and had lulled itself into a false sense of security. It is like someone who has been in a secure job for years. As a result it has spent and borrowed in the same way as many of its population and saving for a rainy day was not something it worried about.

So now both countries are in recession. To me they are like two people being made redundant. Singapore has a load of savings in the bank however the UK has a mortgage to pay and a load of credit card debt. Their room for manoeuvre could not be more different.

All the UK can do is cut back as much as possible and borrow to cover its living costs. However Singapore is in the enviable position of being able to reluctantly dip into its savings.

The example I have noticed this most is in education. Singapore has a very well funded education system in fact when visiting a Polytechnic the other week and a library another I was hugely impressed with the facilities available. Faced with the current recession Singapore’s reaction has not been to cut budgets but to increase the money it puts into education by 20%. It also has all sorts of schemes into place to pay companies to put people into training instead of making them redundant. This is smart as when the economy recovered Singapore’s population will have and even higher level of education and be even more competitive in the world.

The UK on the other hand only really has the option of cutting back on education and is proposing increasing university fees for students. I was interested to see a couple days ago there was an article in the Guardian by Brian Cantor where he suggested the UK taking similar steps to Singapore. I totally agree with him that it is the right thing to do but I cannot see it happening. The UK does not seem to think in that long term way and even if it did it probably could not afford it. I fear when the UK comes out of recession the population is going to have a lower educational level and be a lot less competitive in the world than at the moment.

I don’t know exactly how typical the UK’s position is of Europe and how typical Singapore’s position is of Asia but from what I understand this is reflected in other countries to an extent. It seems to me that there is potential for a large skills gap to open between Asia and Europe and it will be interesting to see if economic power shifts as a result over the coming decades.