Courtesy of the public radio show Marketplace, the best "skills gap" article I have read in months, written by Mitchell Hartman (emphases mine):
...Amy Glaser, of the national HR and recruitment firm Adecco Staffing USA, said that early last year, employers started complaining in earnest about a growing “skills gap” — saying they couldn’t find enough qualified applicants to fill current job openings. And Glaser said their concerns have only heightened since then, with “problems in the high-demand job areas such as engineering and technology, health care and customer service.”
Glaser lays some of the blame with employers, some of whom she said are not willing to raise wages enough to attract the best talent, even as the job market becomes more of a “candidate’s market.”
Economist Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute said many employers also expect to be able to find the perfect candidate — with precisely the skills and prior experience they list on the job description.
“Firms are looking for somebody who won’t require training,” said Strain, “someone who will hit the ground running on day-one. And they’re not able to find that.”
Strain believes the so-called “skills gap” that employers complain about might be mitigated by employers investing in on-the-job training once they’ve hired people with the general skill-set they think is needed....Surely the world must be ending tomorrow.
I love the free market advocates who want government to fund research that trains their job candidates and generates inventions, discoveries and technologies that they can commercionalize, and then they bitterly complain about government not giving enough H1B and J visa to skilled people from abroad who could willing to work for less...
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing is every job I have ever had I had to learn much of the specifics on the job... but I got no training from my employer and just had to go to the literature and figure things out on my own...
ReplyDeleteI could do that because I was more of a generalist that a specialist. I have an MS not PhD and my MS was non thesis so I had to take just about all the grad courses my chemistry department had...
My first job was in a very specialized subfield and my other jobs have been at startups with unique technologies...
Apparently that is the only type of job I CAN get hired at... When I got laid off at my previous job which was startup (FDA did not like our phase 3 results), I was out of work for a year and a half until I got hired at another unique startup (I've been there over 5 years now).
When I hired people for my departments I looked for overall competence, experience with some of the relevant techniques and show intellegence and flexibility...
What I have not put high on the list was experience with the specific types of compounds and problems at hand. I figured they could learn about that on the job... And doing that ells keep them engaged and happy.