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Robot growing pains: Two U.S. factories show tensions of going digital
President Donald Trump has put bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States at the center of his economic and trade agenda. But when jobs actually come - as they have here in southern Indiana - many factory workers are not prepared for them, and employers are having trouble hiring people with the needed skills.
U.S. manufacturing job openings stand near a 15 year high and factories are hiring workers at the fastest clip since 2014, with many employers saying the hardest-to-fill jobs are those that involve technical skills that command top pay.
In 2000, over half of U.S. manufacturing workers had only high school degrees or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today, 57 percent of manufacturing workers have technical school training, some college or full college degrees, and nearly a third of workers have bachelors or advanced degrees, up from 22 percent in 2000.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the digitalization sweeping the economy is forcing employers to hunt for a different mix of workers - and pay more in some cases for workers with technical skills. A new study by Muro found those with the highest digital skills saw average wage growth of 2 percent a year since 2010, while wages for those with medium skills grew by 1.4 percent and those at the bottom by 1.6 percent.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 28 2017, @02:44PM (2 children)
Overall, what happened to training is increasing worker mobility. A couple generations ago, families mostly grew up and stayed in a town or even the same neighborhood in a city. They'd get a job and work at the same place for 40 years. Companies invested in workers with training and promoting from within, because it was a good long-term investment. Employees stuck with companies because loyalty brought benefits.
At some point, moving between jobs and between cities became more of the norm. The implied "contract" between employers and employees for long-term loyalty no longer seemed optimal for either party. We can argue about who broke the "contract" first, but really it was a joint decision. Companies don't train because they perceive it as lost investment if the worker leaves; workers don't stay if they have skills and can walk into a higher wage or promotion elsewhere.
Nowadays it's mostly the employers who are making this trend worse by treating workers (especially low wage ones) like crap. But fundamentally, companies prefer not to invest in training because the relationship has changed. Well, that and because of stupid HR policies that now screen out bright trainable people just because they lack some stupid summary metric of experience or credentials that's often pretty meaningless once someone has been in a job for six months.
(Score: 2) by bootsy on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:21PM
I agree with your points but in these days of 3 years staying in a job being a good stint it is interesting that HR departments have stronge evidence that training people actually causes some job stickiness and they stay longer. Offering yearly training is now considered best practice if you want to retain staff for longer. Even 1 year more saves a lot of money as time spent interviewing and agents' fees are expensive and work won't be done with no one in the role thus losing opportunity.
In my career in IT I would tend to agree that training is a positive and that taking time to train people up pays off in an economic sense. Even when they leave it is entirely possible they will rejoin at a later stage in their career as long as nobody burns any bridges and leave on good terms, which most people seem to do.
I think a bigger issue is that companies don't increase pay with experience/training in line with the market rate and it always seems to be easier to get more money by moving as others value your skill set more than your current employer. You leave and employer then ends up paying more money for someone who will need to come up to speed and has no proven track record of actually doing the job.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:39PM
The answer to this is simple - retirement packages with lifetime employment.
It used to be that most S&P500 companies would offer a retirement package that would allow workers to retire in 20 years. The retirees - in their late 40s - would spend the last 3-5 years training their replacement. Nowadays only Blomberg does it (and rather limited at that).
This is the only sustainable model. Even in South Korea, once they killed lifetime employment, 90% of the brightest students don't go to work for corporations. They become doctors and lawyers (how many of them can we digest, I wonder). Japan ate this bullet 30 years ago.
It would take at least 2 generations to fix the issue even if the authorities really want it which they don't.
There will be blood.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.