Talks about employment trends with baby boomer skills leaving workforce, difficulty in finding employees with needed skills, training of same by business, what will happen if economy heats up and skills are still hard to find, etc
“Apprenticeship programs have collapsed,” he said. “We’ve got, by far, the least apprenticeship training per capita than any other industrialized country.
That has shifted the burden of skills training to employers – a burden many say they’re unwilling or unable to take on. The current dearth of company-sponsored training programs is also, in part, a hangover from the mass layoffs and hiring freezes that accompanied the Great Recession.
Gary replied:
We have a lot of trends converging here. On a “public” level, the educational system lost its way and does not provide the training that is needed – is there really a reason that programming is not mandatory in high school and maybe K-12? Perhaps the worst culprit is the Community College system – actually the name helped create the problem – we used to call them junior colleges and Europe call them trade schools – that was the original objective, but somehow the focus became being a “pathway to 4-year college”.
On the “business” side, the short-term profit fixation of the “beggar the future” incentives of compensation plans tied to today’s the stock market performance means ever increasing pressure to pay nothing.
When we couple that with the end of the long-term employee/employer relationship, it means that society must come up with a new model. Unless and until we do, these kind of articles will continue – remember companies can always outsource offshore or to robots – or just redeploy their capital elsewhere.