[Retric]

6 months may not be enough to train up someone without a technical background, but when a skill shortage extends beyond the time horizon of training a pool of 100’s of thousands of people up it’s very much self inflicted as the company simply does not want to pay market rate + training.

PS: People with related skills can always pick up these deep specialty skills with extreme speeds. I have seen someone paid contractor rates to learn a extreme specialty. Including that training, he actually finished the project in less time than the original team had wasted.

[jandrewrogers]

There are many deep specialties that no one picks up with "extreme speed" no matter how technical they are, certainly not to the level required by companies that want to hire these skills. Think database kernel engineering or non-trivial parallel systems design. Acquiring these skills happens almost exclusively by apprenticing for years with real experts. In six months you could go from no skills to mediocre skills with a lot of training, but no one wants "mediocre" working on their database kernel for good reason.

It would be like me assuming that I, a broadly competent technical expert, could quickly and easily develop a deep expertise in e.g. high-performance graphics engines. A diagnosis of Dunning-Kruger would not be incorrect were I to make such an assertion.

[Retric]

This is not a new problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_the_...

Look into it’s history and Walt Disney has been training animators for decades. It’s a deep skill that is takes significant time to master, so you need an actual pipeline.

Continuing the idea, NASA trains astronauts. They don’t need very many world wide, but they need a few and the only way to get them is to train these people.

I could go on, but outside of a months to few years for absolutely new fields shortages are by design.