There has been a lot of talk recently about bringing good jobs back to the US . I occasionally hear about the skills gap, and how there are vast numbers of high paying jobs going unfilled because they can’t find qualified workers. Is there any truth to this?
It’s half true from what I can see. When employers say they can’t find employees to fill a job, what they usually mean is, “we can’t find an employee who has the skills we need at the pay we are willing to offer”. Sometimes it’s more along the lines of, “We can’t find an employee who has the skills in the local area, although if we cast a wider net and considered remote candidates or candidates who are willing to relocate, we could find someone”. And sometimes the truth is, “We can’t find someone with the skills, but we do have employees we could develop from within, but nah, we don’t feel like making the effort.”
But yes, it can be difficult to fill some positions. The problem is that companies take the easy way out and ask for an H-1B so they can just bring someone qualified in at the rate they want to pay.
Do skills grow obsolete? Yes. In programming alone, a worker who hasn’t learned a new platform in five years is probably working on legacy software and could be RIFfed almost any day, with little chance of getting another job using that skill set. There are thousands of job categories and fields where the skill set is almost as ephemeral, or simply outdated - the demand for machinists and tool and die makers has dropped precipitiously in the face of CNC and CAM. There are jobs going begging for good CNC operators, but they can’t be filled by even the best lathe-and-mill machinist without extensive retraining.
And yes, that often means “locally” - there might be a great candidate three states over, but the job won’t pay enough nor be guaranteed enough for him or her to relocate his family for it. Assuming the company is even looking that way.
So it’s easier to pick from a pool of global applicants who are willing and eager to bring their exact-fit set of skills to East Bumford, Indiana, at a salary most US family wage-earners would have to reject.
The real problem is that the number of “good” jobs (to reduce about six volumes into one word) is steadily shrinking as the labor pool keeps expanding. Time to stop wishing 1955 to return and look at a new jobs/wage/economy model.
When I was a software engineer and last on the job market this was my experience. But the employers often made things worse for everybody (candidates and themselves) by listing extremely specific requirements like X years of experience with a specific VERSION of some software or toolset. That’s extremely frustrating because it’s common knowledge among IT professionals that after you learn 2 or 3 different languages or tools, you become adept at simply learning. You can pick up working level of understanding of new languages and tools in a matter of weeks, for a very short ramp up time. But employers seemed not to have the patience even for that. I also noticed that the software development jobs in my expertise area were all changed to 3-month contracts with permanent full time jobs very few and far between. Essentially they treated the workforce like 1099 contractors - mercenaries for hire. Which is not a bad gig unless you have a family and roots and can’t simply migrate to a new job location every 3 months.
I got fed up and re-branded myself as an IT business analyst. I have a much longer “shelf life” and hireability now.
Speaking of the claimed “skills gap” in general, I want to tell an interesting story that happened just before I threw in the towel as a software engineer.
My expertise was on a platform called OpenVMS, and I had experience in the business domains of public safety and manufacturing and distribution. At this time I had just over 20 years under my belt. So not green. I could easily pick up any business domain and any new software languages as mentioned above. I happened upon a job ad for VMS programmers in the health care domain, working on veteran’s administration systems. The ad required experience in both the VMS platform and the health care domain. I applied but got no calls.
A few weeks later, the same ad popped up listed from a different body shop/staffing company. I applied to that one also, got no calls.
A few weeks later, the same ad was listed by two other body shops. The ad was verbatim from the first one, except the title was increasingly urgent, with things like “NEEDED NOW” added to the title. Curious, I did a VMS programming job search with no geographical filtering (all of the USA) and found the same exact job listed in several major geographical areas with even more urgency in the title. “GREAT JOB, NEED DEVELOPERS URGENTLY”, that kind of thing. I didn’t apply to any of these because I can take a hint.
At the time I happened to be participating in a VMS internet forum. A few months after that flurry of urgently searching the world for VMS developers with health care backgrounds, someone with an eastern Indian name popped up in that forum asking for help with the software language. It was an extremely basic question and he mentioned enough detail that it was clear he was working on that Veterans administration project. So, they managed to find a programmer after all. Not impressed that they passed by a 20-year veteran in the platform and hired someone with no experience, though.
Sour grapes aside, companies are perfectly entitled to hire who they like. But in my opinion, relaxing the platform requirement while holding firm to the business domain requirement is the wrong move. It’s much easier to teach an experienced programmer a new business domain than to teach a non-technical business domain expert how to do software engineering.
Heh. In about 30 minutes I’ll be logging onto a VMS system to debug some license issues. My most valuable skill now is my legacy background but there’s an ever decreasing need for it. I’m primarily working on the company’s bleeding edge products using the latest and greatest software that will be someone’s legacy tomorrow, it’s not easy keeping up with the pace of change, but I’m doing pretty well compared to some of the younger crowd because I’ve been through so many software revolutions in my life already. The hardest part is getting excited about each new latest and greatest development because they all just look like the old ones with a new clothes on.
I’ve been a machinist for 20 years and yes it’s hard to find someone skilled, willing to show up, and pass a drug test.
The reason we don’t have skilled people is that no one wants to train people anymore. Even if they come out of a vo tech or community college program, they need more training and it doesn’t happen or its hit and miss. Theres lots of one shop wonders out there who can do the work they had been doing but don’t have the broad skills and background to jump to another job. Also with modern tech, there will be one skilled guy and a bunch of button pushers. Those button pushers don’t have the opportunity to learn
from experience.
I also see a real lack of training with engineers. Companies will take a fresh grad and tell him to design stuff but college teaches theory not practical design and industry specific institutional type of knowledge.
Probably only a little. I think there’s a bit of an age/skill gap.
In Canada, people have gotten more educated over the generations. There are a lot of people born here in the Depression era with grade 8 education. (So many, I wonder if that was the earliest age you could drop out of school back then.) Not all that relevant, as they’re usually no longer in the work force. But young adults in Canada and the US have the highest rates of post-secondary completion ever in our histories.
So there’s complaining in the States that older middle aged people used to be able to support a family financially, with a homemaker and a house, with a high school-educated breadwinner. Those jobs still exist, even if they’re dwindling in number since stuff gets made outside the US where it’s cheaper now, but those jobs still in the US require a college diploma now. I don’t know if sending such people to college to upgrade will work, because there’s fewer manufacturing jobs available.
I’m probably overstating things. I would hope a 20 year veteran machinist with a high school diploma with top marks in shop class and a two decade reputation of good work could get a new job in the same field, but maybe the employers prefer a Millennial with a college diploma (who also had good marks) who they can pay less, even though they will have to pay to train them. (Meanwhile said Millennial is probably having a hard time finding a job as they naturally have less experience in the field.)
There’s also vague talk about computerizing things. Where I work you couldn’t possibly hold a job if you weren’t computer-literate, but a lot of older employees say they only use a computer at work, have to ask somewhat basic questions, and in short only learn the minimum needed to operate the computers (while being experts in all the other areas of work). To even get the job you had to do tests on a computer, you had to apply by email, etc.
Younger people (those I deal with, rather than coworkers) aren’t necessarily all that computer-literate either, especially if they weren’t very well educated. They’d rather mail stuff (despite the possibility of it getting lost or untracked, causing panicked calls) rather than send stuff electronically. At first I was surprised, wondering how could you be so illiterate with (and afraid of) technology, but when I was a kid there really wasn’t much training. In junior high they put us in front of Macintosh computers and just left us alone. An hour later we were all using the simple UI, but we didn’t get much computer time so you needed a computer at home to learn stuff. It’s quite possible to be only barely computer literate with a high school diploma, it seems. (While kids these days tend to carry smartphones, those aren’t full computers, and I don’t really know if they’re using them as academic tools.)
By contrast, the last university course I took literally could not be done without the assistance of the Internet. It was a lab course and we couldn’t even do the lab sessions without answering safety questions which we got off part of the school website. (Well, I guess you could have a friend print the pages off… Also, no one has a printer anymore.) There were computers at the universities (always occupied, but still) so not having your own computer and Internet access wasn’t really an excuse, but it was much more convenient having a computer. I wonder how many fifty year olds who don’t have a computer but are learning how to use a smartphone are prepared for some modern jobs.
Part of the problem is that everything is disposable now. Companies don’t expect their product design to last long term, and as a result they don’t care about quality. Get it done, out the door, make the money, move on. Everything changes so fast they have to get the product out, next year there may be no demand. And that’s certainly fed from the demand side too, the consumers of the products don’t want to wait, they’ll take what’s available and know they’ll be changing everything before long.
That doesn’t apply to absolutely everything, but the model for building marketshare now is to be there first, not be there with the best.
Non sequitur, IMHO. Disposable products (whether tissues or cheap cars) have to be manufactured at a higher rate than durables, so it could be argued that “planned obsolescence” and its ilk promote jobs and wages and employment.
Even the crappiest plastic thingummy has to have precision molds made for it.
Planned Obsolescence is a better description. The molds have to be made, but the product they make doesn’t have to be as good as it used to be. For a certain range of products just a lower sale price is sufficient. They’ll be made offshore, or from a different material, or just become unnecessary before long.
Albeit one I dislike intensely. It’s a sweeping dismissal based on a limited understanding of what’s actually going on. But never mind that.
I still see cheaper, crappier products as promoting jobs and manufacturing rather than the other way around.
Maybe drop the drug test requirement? Imagine for a second an employer said “it’s hard to find someone who is skilled, can show up AND is a teetotaler”. Any sane person would say “gee, teetotaler sounds entirely irrelevant to the job, maybe stop excluding perfectly qualified candidates for no good reason and you might not have this problem anymore?”.
Not saying it’s your policy or your choice, but I have zero sympathy for employers who write off millions of qualified candidates from the applicant pool for no reason and then complain about how they can’t find anyone to hire.
I agree, but it’s not necessarily supporting the more skilled jobs, or the jobs in this country.
Coming to work high or drunk is a really bad idea in many industries.
And an insurance/liability nightmare with on-the-job injuries.
Well, maybe, but the term dates from at least the 1950s, long before jobs started fading or moving overseas. IIRC, part of the theory was exactly what I said: that it would stimulate factory productivity and jobs.
Until some schlock factory in Taiwan could do it just as good, and a lot cheaper. Then it became a disdainful issue of American manufacturers’ pride in their workmanship.
DrCube
FWIW I agree as far as marijuana. I own a restaurant besides the day job. If I were to drug test, it would be a one man show. Instead I judge employees by performance but that’s not how companies of any size do things now days.
True enough but being under the influence on the job and on your own time are different things.
Another random thought, some of the best guys I have worked with had learning disabilities. They were very sharp but didn’t do well at formal school so they ended up in the trades. Now days those kids get help and end up on another path.
Sure. But the problem is some drug tests will pick up drugs used long after the effect has worn off the worker is no longer high. Smoking marijuana on Friday evening doesn’t mean you’re unqualified to work on Monday morning.
Most drug tests used in employment are qualitative, not quantitative, since it’s (been) typically zero-tolerance. It’s more difficult and expensive to quantify the level of THC. With weed coming into legality, we’re going to need a good quantitative test equal to that of fast blood-alcohol testing.