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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: 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.