[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.

[Hyena]

Oh, I agree that this is a problem, but you have to admit that attempting to patch workers is a far better medium term solution than trying to besiege the education system for 20 years.

[cageface]

Sure, it doesn't have to be an either/or thing, but it's important to realize that our current problems are many years in the making and might take many years to really fix.

[Hyena]

For a simpler long term fix, we could just change how we do college admissions. For example, if we raised the entry requirements for 18 year-olds and kept the requirements re people in their mid-20s and up.

That would eliminate lots of liberal arts majors very quickly, replacing them with more technical people who are better motivated for difficult subjects. It's not an elegant solution, but it's probably easier than untangling the knot of education or somehow getting the political will to slice it in twain.