Not the worst, needs improvement
Karim Bourouba wrote:
"What you appear to have missed, and I cant see why at all, is the fact the too many people in Scotland seem to have this strange idea about it being a business center for the UK. There is very little in the way of skills up here, granted there is a plethora of service and support people up here as well as a large glut of Citrix specialists (off the back of the support centers here). Other than that, there is very little else (even the financial centers here dont really come to much)."
This is utter drivel - yes, there's areas like the Borders that don't have a big business/IT presence, (although I'd be okay if someone wants to say otherwise), but they tend to be into farming/fishing/etc. Heck, go to Edinburgh/Glasgow and you'll see plenty of new businesses, banks etc - e.g. RBOS finished their headquarters near Edinburgh airport last year.
As for lack of skills apart from Citrix? Again, this is rubbish. I'm an IT worker up here and there's plenty of jobs available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, Oracle, SAP etc - check out monster, s1jobs, etc.
I'm English (no boo's from the back) and I moved to Scotland (from London) to take advantage of the better quality of life (definitely!) and the superior education system (at least when they stop fiddling with it - grrr!).
Okay, I'd agree the standard of health up here is pretty bad - alcohol, smoking, too many good chippies - but they're working on it, (smoking ban last year is marvellous).
As to the survey itself - like others have said, someone had to be last. If it means that the (recently changed) government (in their awful and overpriced parliment) is encouraged to put in improvements, then so much the better.
I think a UK region-by-region version of this survey would make interesting reading...