ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the responses to microelectronics-related technical changes in products by the personnel and training functions of companies in the engineering industries of the United Kingdom and, what was at the time, West Germany. Regarding training practices, there was some confirmation of the Anglo-German differences already familiar from the work of Prais and K. Wagner and A. Sorge and M. Warner among others, although confirmation was at least partly mitigated by a degree of convergence in some key areas of difference. British companies, It was stated earlier that British and German firms suffer from similar shortages of electronics graduate skills. The shortages operate in different industrial contexts, however. Differences appear even where British companies have managed to make this transition. Several British companies in the medium-sized bracket had achieved a dramatic shift in the weighting of disciplines from being wholly mechanical, to being between one and two-thirds electronics-based.
