[fatalisk]

What's really interesting here is that companies are reporting awesome earnings[1], yet they're still resting on their laurels when it comes to hiring.

And, I think everyone is outraged when it comes to what's going on in Washington right now.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/18038403/

[cageface]

Or, to put it another way, companies just don't need as many unskilled workers as they did a decade ago.

[Hyena]

All companies need unskilled people: you train them so your business can expand. That's where global supply chain managers and database programmers came from originally--and in many cases still do--they don't fall from the clouds.

The issue is that a lot of these companies are only expanding overseas, so they're not really ready to hire and train people. Much of their profits come from cutting back on their junior staff, from laying off the next generation of skilled workers.

[cageface]

As an employer, I'd be willing to take a chance on a new employee without experience if he/she could demonstrate some aptitude and some effort to learn independently. I got my first software job with no formal training this way. I spent several months studying Java on my own and did well enough on an interview test to persuade the company to give me a shot at a low salary.

However, I don't think I'd be interesting in bringing somebody up from absolutely nothing. It's just too big a risk and an investment. I think the fundamental problem is that the American public education system just isn't training people in the skills they need to succeed in a modern economy.

[nowarninglabel]

Yes! It's the U.S. educational system that refuses to move into the 21st century that is not providing the needed skills to new workers.

[Hyena]

This isn't going to help us. The "reform the education system" model is usually an incredibly stupid idea. The issue is that you're essentially farming: you take 22 years to grow a new crop of skilled workers.

In the education reform arena, what we should concentrate more on is patching workers. Most people could probably gain hackable proficiency in languages like Java or Python in 6 months or less. We need to be concentrating on this sort of thing, not making high school and college better.

An example: the retraining benefits attached to UI are often meager and highly targeted towards special interests (the construction and healthcare industries seem to loom rather large in my conversations with EDD). What we could be doing instead, at least in California, is directing the CCs and CSUs to create 6 month curricula in more portable skills. Again, we could be teaching scripting languages plus basic data analysis skills.

[cageface]

What if it takes 20 years to grow a crop of skilled workers? Go ahead and walk down to the unemployment center, pick 20 people at random, and let me know how their Python coding is coming along six months from now.

I was able to jump into programming because I was lucky enough to get a solid math & science education that nurtured whatever innate talent I had. The kind of analytical thinking it takes to do higher-level information work can't be taught from scratch in a few months.

Both my parents teach at the University level and they tell me that the students they see coming into their classes now can't even write a simple, logically coherent essay.

[ericd]

I don't want to hire a DBA that's never touched a DB before at this point, though - since that field has been around for a while now, there's now a lot of signaling where before noone could distinguish themselves. Those who have the aptitude and/or are motivated/interested in the field have made themselves into DBAs or something similar that could easily transition on their own time. I don't want to hire a warm body that's looking to work just for a paycheck. If you've never bothered to learn to program, I don't want to hire you as a programmer, even if I think I could train you.

There is a shortage of employable people in the US, and a glut of unemployable. To me, this means that our culture and our education system need a lot of help.

[Hyena]

My point is that when DBAs were new(ish), you had a lot of people you had to train to become them. We don't see this as a problem now because we're past that point in the database arena. The people I knew who ran databases when I was in high school had all learned it on a job somewhere. It's only with my generation (it seems) that DBA was something you got a lot of external training for.

Some of the jobs quoted in the article are short workers because they're relatively new. "Managing integrated supply chains" is something most workers would have learned only recently, since before the spread of IT in the late 1990s/2000s it was pretty much the province of major corporations.

[ars]

> you train them so your business can expand

That only worked when people stayed with a single employer for years. These days they would take the training and get a better job somewhere else.

[Hyena]

Most businesses take about 6 months to train people, it seems, from informal polling of acquaintances.

[tomjen3]

What is it they say? "Better to educate your people and risk they leave than to not, and risk they stay?"

But yeah, training would be more likely if you either took a lower salary (part of your income comes in the form of training) or agreed to stay with the firm for a number of years.

[sliverstorm]

You can interpret that several ways. Perhaps those awesome earnings are short-term gains due to not paying wages for all those empty jobs, but long-term losses due to faltering growth as a result of all those empty jobs?