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The idea that American workers are being left in the dust because they lack technological savvy does not stand up to scrutiny. Our focus should be on coordination and communication between workers and employers.
Technology enthusiasts and entrepreneurs are among the loudest voices declaiming this conventional wisdom (see "The Hunt for Qualified Workers").
Two recent developments have heightened debate over the idea of a "skills gap": an unemployment rate below 5 percent, and the growing fear that automation will render less-skilled workers permanently unemployable.
Proponents of the idea tell an intuitively appealing story: information technology has hit American firms like a whirlwind, intensifying demand for technical skills and leaving unprepared American workers in the dust. The mismatch between high employer requirements and low employee skills leads to bad outcomes such as high unemployment and slow economic growth.
The problem is, when we look closely at the data, this story doesn't match the facts. What's more, this view of the nation's economic challenges distracts us from more productive ways of thinking about skills and economic growth while promoting unproductive hand-wringing and a blinkered focus on only the supply side of the labor market—that is, the workers.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608707/the-myth-of-the-skills-gap/
What do you think, is there a shortage of skilled workers ??
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday August 26 2017, @01:37PM (1 child)
Ya know, before I got my BS degree I got an AS degree to get the job to pay for the BS degree etc, and the local uni won't teach stuff like wiring color codes (for like 25 pair cables, etc) and 66 and 110 punchdown blocks and terminating and testing cat-5 cable or fiber because they're too high end and every uni grad will spend their careers exclusively writing compilers and solving automata theory problems (I took those classes for my BS degree). That combined with HR demanding a BS degree because they can due to unemployment results in people unqualified to wire a datacenter being stuck wiring a datacenter. I got my first "real" job at this financial services company and mystified by boss by already knowing all that lower level stuff from having taken classes. It was not hard to learn and the pay was "OK" for an AS degree.
Honestly they should have hired an AS community college grad not a uni grad.
It sounds great that we graduate only cardiologists now, we're all cardiologists now, isn't that great? The problem is there's more than a few cardiologists who can't put on a band-aid because they were too busy memorizing heart artery names, while most of the real world workload is for band-aid level medical problems.
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Saturday August 26 2017, @04:27PM
Wow - wiring and termination... learned that on the job decades ago. Brings back a lot of memories. I still have BIX and Krone punchdown tools, an AMP RJ-xx crimper, and various coax tools. The other day, I ran across an old ThickNet vampire tap - I plan on putting it in a shadow box, as a nerd conversation piece.
Mas cerveza por favor.