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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 Saturday July 01 2017, @12:28AM
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?