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America has more than 6 million vacant jobs, yet the country is "facing a serious skills gap," Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta recently said. And last week his boss, President Donald Trump, said he wants to close this gap by directing $100 million of federal money into apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships in the U.S. are generally known for training workers for blue collar jobs like plumbers or electricians, but with a little tweak, they could be the path to lucrative, white collar tech jobs across the country. Not just in coastal cities, but also in the Midwest, South, and across the Great Plains.
But to get there we need to erase the notion that highly paid jobs require a college degree. It's not always true. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, among others, has called for a shift in focus: "skills, not degrees. It's not skills at the exclusion of degrees. It's just expanding our perspective to go beyond degrees."
An academic degree signals to employers that a person has successfully completed a course of study, but it does not provide a clear assessment of someone's skills. Companies, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, are shifting their recruiting process from "where did you study?" to "what can you do?".
Germans have long cited their apprenticeship system as a factor in their economic success. Would it help America and elsewhere, too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:29PM (4 children)
It's not about training or degrees, it's about IQ. Not all people are created equal, there are some training some people will never understand. This is true. And there are lot of things that even thou you could train a person of not the highest intellect to do, these things change OFTEN (due to rapid advancement in technology) and you may have to train them all the time if they can't understand the changes as they happen. This is why companies want to hedge by getting the smartest person they can. But the bell-curve is bell-curve and there is only so much area under the upper portion of the distribution. Nothing will fix this. All they can do is outbid other companies/industries to get a bigger share of the area, import the best from another country, or muck about trying to come up with half-solutions.
PS. Germany is over, stop referring to it like it's a place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:38PM (1 child)
You mostly can't test applicant IQ. It isn't exactly against the law to test, but you open yourself up to lawsuits. Courts have held that IQ testing is racial discrimination... incidentally showing that courts have racist beliefs about IQ. :-)
You can get away with demanding a particular education, even if the requirement is silly. It is a silly requirement if any degree will do the job, since the education obviously isn't being put to use, but the requirement stands in for an IQ test. It also serves as a class test, filtering out low-class people who might act in offensive ways in a whitecollar/professional/office work environment.
Unless the law is fixed to allow IQ tests, which isn't likely, employers will continue to demand otherwise-inappropriate degrees.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:12AM
You can test for skills in computer programming and hacking or maths as a proxy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:49PM (1 child)
I agree that not all people are equally intelligent, but IQ is pseudoscience from the bowels of the social sciences. We don't even have a mediocre understanding of intelligence, let alone how to accurately measure someone's intellect. IQ is, at best, correlated with several things, but we have no idea how much those things are related to one's intelligence. I'm really getting tired of people referring to IQ, especially in a place like this.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:22PM
I agree. One of the biggest problems with the idea of IQ is that it is a gross oversimplification. It's taking something complicated and reducing it to a single number. At least schools consider more than test scores on the SAT or ACT or whatever, which are pretty close to being just IQ tests, when evaluating applicants.
It wouldn't work well if we did the same thing with baseball players, tried to come up with a Baseball Quotient (BQ) to measure overall performance. Instead, there are a bunch of stats to measure players' performance in each aspect of the game, so that teams can make more intelligent decisions, and not, for instance, drop a great pitcher from the team because his batting average stinks and drags his BQ down to mediocre levels.
Moneyball was all about coming up with better measures. We should do something similar to replace the IQ measure, and to popularize replacements. At least D&D has two relevant stats: Intelligence and Wisdom. But I haven't heard of any serious attempt to define and measure wisdom, just the woolly notion that everyone slowly gains it as they age and accumulate life experiences. There's this idea of Emotional Intelligence (EI) that received some attention. Then there are these "no wrong answer" personality categories such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (most people on here are probably INTP), and Lowry's True Colors personality test, and for thinking styles, Gregorc's mind style model. We got to hoping that ability in chess was so closely correlated with intelligence that if we could create a machine that could win at chess, we would also have created a real AI. Instead, and somewhat embarrassingly, we found that chess isn't so strongly correlated with intelligence as that, that dumb brute force calculation at incredible speeds can win chess games, which in hindsight is rather obvious. The Alpha Go people were not laboring under that delusion, thanks to the results from chess.