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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the skills-not-degrees dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Beau Slim on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:41PM (7 children)

    by Beau Slim (6628) on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:41PM (#533082)

    If there was a real shortage, companies would pay more or hire someone and then do in-house training.

    Their real goal is to hire cheap foreign workers so they can pay less. So they tighten the job requirements to ensure that nobody qualifies, and then go to a hiring firm that claims a foreign worker has those skills even though they don't. Which is fine because the requirements were made up anyway.

    Any politician buying into this nonsense is being played.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:58PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:58PM (#533095)

    > Any politician buying into this nonsense is being played.

    You should proofread before you post, to avoid typos.
    The correct spelling is "paid"

  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:36PM (#533107)

    Any politician buying into this nonsense is being played.

    You misspelled "paid."

  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:48PM (#533149)

    "Any politician buying into this nonsense is being paid."

    FTFY

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:16AM (3 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday June 30 2017, @05:16AM (#533306) Journal

    There's a new opportunity opening up. Corporations run by generalists using cheap foreign labor with knowledge and without understanding. Don't considering them as assholes which they are. But instead future prey.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @12:30PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @12:30PM (#533392)

      Wouldn't that be nice. Unfortunately, you are going to have to contend with monopoly power, the fact that your competition can outspend you 10000 to 1 just to kill off your enterprise, as well as a legal and political system that is rigged in their favor. Every new law favors large companies over startups, increases the cost of starting a new venture, and most of the places you can go to get the money you need live in that same culture. What gets "funded" these days is just as twisted as the operation of the large players.

      And without the deep pockets, good luck complying with all the new regulations that come out on a continual basis.

      Society has set up significant roadblocks to the creation of new businesses to protect existing interests from competition (obviously at the expense of the average joe).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @03:43PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @03:43PM (#533501)

        This is the king of gov regulation that liberals would be fine with eliminating. Some regulation is necessary, and I agree bureaucratic costs to businesses should be kept minimal.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @12:28AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @12:28AM (#533770)

          Both sides of the political aisle are guilty of competition-limiting regulation. Often it gets pushed as "consumer protection" or "punishing the big corporations". But every time there is any legislation that targets a particular industry, what happens is the "experts" on that industry are the ones who write it. Those "experts" are, you guessed it, people who have experience at the big players, people who are invested in the status quo. So the status quo gets institutionalized in the law. And as a bonus, the larger volume of rules requires a startup to have an ever bigger team of lawyers working overtime to figure out what needs to be done to comply.

          For the big players figuring out the compliance process is a smaller part of their total cost, plus their people wrote the law anyway.

          Some of the rank and file political left might be against this, but none of their leaders are. When it is billed as "punishing the big guy" it gets pretty broad support. But, punishing the big guy actually has the opposite effect. Funny how that works out, what a huge coincidence right?