The what now? 
Good point. I’m a software developer and I am constantly receiving calls from recruiting companies who want me to fill out a detailed questionnaire listing how many years experience I have in each of a dozen tools. And then oh, sorry, they “need” someone with 5 years of experience in Java, seven in Oracle, and three in Rational Rose. No, they don’t. They need someone who can accomplish the job. A good software developer can retrain on the tool du jour pretty quickly.
Exactly.
A few years ago I managed to get a (warm body) job as a business analyst with a large corporation. I was breaking out of system engineering (done with the tech hamster wheel that we’re talking about here), and into something related so that I still marginally qualified for. They used a product there called DOORS. Object oriented document repository. I never heard of it before, but fortunately they didn’t ask about it in my interview. It took me two weeks to learn the basics in the course of doing the work, and by two months I was doing stuff with it that wasn’t supposed to be possible. (Using different text colors. I figured out a cool trick!)
Employers need to learn that they don’t want people who are trained script monkeys. They need people with intelligence, tenacity, and the ability to figure things out.
^ This. Labor is a commodity, jobs are not. Labor (the worker) is free to go to the highest bidder, but a job is worth a set amount of money. That value is generally set at a ratio of 3.5 - the job needs to generate 3.5 times more in income than it pays. Paying more for a job than it’s worth is a recipe for bankruptsy, plain and simple.
For example, it takes sales of about $1,000,000 a year for a full service restaurant to make a profit. Assuming that restaurant is open 12 hours per day, seven days a week, that equates to average sales per hour of $256. Again assuming, say it takes 10 employees on duty at any given time to adequately staff the restaurant. That is $26 per job per hour to meet the sales goal. Using the 3.5 guideline, those 10 jobs are worth, on average, $7.43 per hour - including benefits. The remaining $18.57 goes to food, rent, utilities, insurance, advertising, etc. Anything left is profit, and in this example it’s likely not much. Chik-fil-A can (and in this area does) pay more than the example above, and more than their competitors, because they have the highest per unit salesin the industry. Subway, not so much
That’s why it’s silly to hold a generic sign saying “fast food workers should make $15 per hour”. What the job is worth is pure math, not a slogan.
I’ll third this. I’m always reminded of the SGT Zim boot camp quote from “Starship Troopers”:
“There are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous men.”
I keep thinking of that, because what makes for a good programmer/sys admin/DBA/business analyst/etc… isn’t the tools they’ve used, or are currently using, but rather what they know and how they apply it. They’d be able to figure out some stuff from the 1980s, or learn the latest and greatest, and use either to accomplish the job.
But on the whole, corporate profits are doing pretty well, and the money keeps on flowing to the rich end of the economic spectrum.
To me, that suggests plenty of ability to pay more, but a lack of desire to do so.
If companies were going out of business left and right because workers were demanding too much money, you’d have an argument. But those aren’t the times we live in.
I think there are 4 things that cause this. First, some people put a LOT of self-identity, pride and self-esteem in their career. So if they lose their jobs, they consider themselves IT people or artists, or what-have-you, and don’t entertain the idea of jobs not in their chosen field, and end up enduring long stretches of unemployment.
Second, there are a LOT of people out there who are just not that great at what they do, and as a result are marginally employable in their fields. When the economy’s good, they get hired, and work, but when times get lean, they’re the first to go, and the last to get rehired.
Third, I think a lot of people generally don’t put a lot of forethought into the future, and they end up falling into very narrow and specific jobs, and then when they get laid off or fired, they’ve never really had anything approaching a plan for remaining employed, or moving forward in their careers. So they may have been a checker at Target, and then got laid off, and now they’re pretty much unemployed and unskilled, and unless the other retail businesses are hiring, they’re out of luck for a while.
Fourth, there are the hapless souls who had the deck stacked against them by economic and geographic conditions, and who worked at the one employer that they were qualified to work at in their area, and can’t work there anymore for whatever reason.
With the exception of the first, there does seem to be an expectation that jobs will magically be available and that they’ll get hired, regardless of whether they haven’t cultivated a skill set, or gone somewhere to find a job, or merely found something that they’re better at.
High-tech is just what I’m familiar with, but supply and demand works for everything.
I agree that skills are not the solution for everything. In the coming years, some jobs will have so little value that an infinitely skilled person working for free will still be unemployable. Taxi and truck drivers should worry.
Skills are not irrelevant, though. There are swaths where they do matter. And training can involve moving to an entirely different field.
I’m curious what you think the alternative is. Since training helps some of the time, of course people are going to be suggesting it. A vague declaration that there aren’t enough jobs doesn’t accomplish anything on its own.
If, in fact, there are NOT enough jobs that is a serious problem - particularly somewhere like the US where the safety net for able-bodied adults is nearly non-existent. Do you expect those who are employable but for whom no jobs are available to simply quietly starve?
Except that what you quoted was in response to the issue of employers being unwilling or unable to pay what the job is worth, IOW employers thinking “fast food worker should make $ 5 per hour” and then complaining that they can’t find anybody.
The poster you were quoting was stating that he couldn’t afford to pay the market rate for the workers he would need. Which illustrates precisely what the OP is about : when people say “there’s a shortage of labour/skilled workers”, what they really mean is almost always “there’s a shortage of cheap labour/skilled workers”.
If the employer can’t afford to pay the market rate and raise accordingly the price of whatever service he’s offering because customers won’t pay that much for this service, I’m not sure why this is translated as “I could hire but the salary the workers want is too high” rather than “I could hire but the price the customers want is too low”.
It’s because in American society customers=“good” and employees=“expense I wish I could get rid of”.
This whole discussion lacks nuance.
Of course, in manufacturing, a dying industry on its last leg due to intense global competition, there are not enough jobs to fill all the unemployed workers’ needs.
In high tech, a booming industry, there aren’t enough highly-qualified individuals, so companies are actively recruiting outside the United States to get the people they need.
This all boils one to the truth we are missing here: in a modern, global economy, the name of the game is specialization. If you do something no one else can do, then you will get a job no matter what your sector is.
If you are one among the pack, employers will look past you and find the unicorn.
(With regard to the whole “employers are evil and only care about profit” meme, when has that not been the case? Were employers just overtly generous in the 1950’s, or was it that there were plentiful jobs in fields that required little education or training [manufacturing being paramount]?)
Uh-huh. And when your specialization is eliminated by advancing technology you will be regulated to the trash heap, never to work at better than minimum wage ever again. If you’re lucky. Meanwhile being reviled for your “poor” choice of career and accused of being lazy because you’re now impoverished.
One has nothing to do with the other. If you’re dumber than a bunch of rocks than no amount of money will pay for your lack of education.
when I was underemployed looking for factory jobs the recruiters were having a hard time finding people who could do 3rd grade math. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest. The person who hired me seemed surprised that I got all the answers right and I started laughing. I thought she was joking. She then went on to tell me about all the people who took the test on the same day I did and failed it miserably. One of them getting virtually every question wrong.
So yes, they’re telling the truth when they say they can’t fill a vacancy because of the skills needed.
How willing are factories to hire clearly overqualified people? E.g. if you have a master’s degree in some specialty that just isn’t in demand and you decide that you just want to work on an assembly line for a year or two, can you more or less get hired by blowing the exams away? It can’t be that easy - or is it?
There are also plenty of articles out there decrying the US’s terrible literacy rates by talking about the huge number of workers who can’t get a promotion because they can’t read. Maybe I’m in the wrong career! I’ve had a fantasy in the back of my mind for a while of “downgrading” to a lower skilled career and then busting it up with my mad leet basic reading and math skills. No more “exceeding expectations” like Dilbert - show up, do the bare minimum necessary, and take the written promotional exams as soon as they become available. Corner office here I come! Yeah I know it’s not that easy - but how far off is this fantasy?
Depends how old you are. I was hired to do a temporary production run that lasted a year. I was a “temp” with no insurance. Out of boredom I went down the assembly line in my group and improved efficiency. Nothing Earth shattering but I made things run easier and faster by ordering additional tools or having them made up in the tool shop. The production run ended and I went on my way. When jobs opened up I was invisible because of my age. It’s not like it was my ideal job but it paid the bills with enough left over for a beer on Friday.
People who are 50 or older have a hard time competing against younger people because they cost more in medical insurance. If you look around you’ll see a lot of jobs being filled by temp agencies. We just had a fortune 100 company build a humongous distribution center in my area and they’re having it run by multiple temp agencies.
The hiring surge in temp help accounts for 15% of all job growth nationally the last four years (not including self-employment), even though the industry makes up 2% of the nation’s workforce. And in some metropolitan areas, the share of job growth that can be credited to the temp sector is much, much higher: 65% in Cincinnati, 51% in Milwaukee, 46% in Kansas City. Even in bigger metros, like Chicago and Philadelphia, the temp sector accounts for more than 40% of new jobs since 2009.
My SIL quit his job with a major publisher because he was asked which 3 of his 6 editors should be fired so their jobs could be outsourced to India and he would not. He had spent a lot of his time designing their web site. Then he took a course in web design and did well. But every job for a web designer insists on a CS degree, which he doesn’t have. They are not interested in the course he took or the work he did before.
There was an article in a recent issue of my alumni magazine (The Pennsylvania Gazette) on this very topic and they explained that most companies use automatic software to eliminate applications. No CS degree, discard. Less than 7 years of Java experience, discard. The article mentioned one company that got something like 27,000 applicants for a job and couldn’t find even one qualified. It mentioned that one of the main reasons for this was that companies had gotten rid of the HR departments as an unnecessary expense. Then they complain of a shortage of qualified personnel. What ever happened to the idea of hiring capable people and training them?
Your SIL is transgendered…? 
On the same level of stupidity I was talking with a worker at a restaurant about something similar. It’s a large chain with both corporate and franchised stores.
The corporation had tests for applicants that established franchise employees had trouble passing. yet the franchises were already breaking every financial bench mark that the corporate stores were expected (and struggling) to achieve.