American workers—especially fresh graduates—aren't learning the skills they need for today's marketplace. How do I know this? Because the Wall Street Journal tells me so:
The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work
The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country....The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.
This could be true. On the other hand, employers have been griping forever about the lousy skills of kids these days. For example:
- 2002 - Death, taxes, and the skilled labor shortage
- 2006 - Skill Shortages Create a Perfect Storm in the Labor Pool
- 2009 - Lack of computer skills foils many job-seekers
- 2010 - Lack of skilled workers threatens recovery
- 2014 - Employers Aren’t Just Whining – the “Skills Gap” Is Real
- 2015 - Why America Has a Shortage of Skilled Workers
- 2018 - The $8.5 Trillion Talent Shortage
- 2019 - Understanding the skills gap—and what employers can do about it
- 2021 - Nearly half of American companies say they are short on skilled workers
Maybe remote learning during the pandemic really has generated a cohort of undertrained new workers. Or, just maybe, the kids are pretty much the same as always, while employers are annoyed as always that entry-level workers have to learn stuff. It's your call.
Re: Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire.
They aren't looking very hard. Granted I'm not looking for anything entry level, but I have years of experience in the stuff I do, but in five months I can't even get an interview. Oh, and I see job ads with over a dozen "must haves" and those are not top-of-the-line jobs. My suspicions are that A) many job postingsd, especially those with long list of very particular requirements, are just out there as a formality and the firm is planning to promote someone from within. B) Some firms are claiming they can't find candidates so they can justify bringing in low wage foreigners who will need sponsorship and C) Age discrimination is rampant- companies want skills, but they do not want older workers they can't pay entry level salaries.
Corporations want someone else (the schools) to train their employees, but they don't want to pay any taxes to support it.
And we have a winner. Employers want workers who "can hit the ground running" or whatever the current buzz phrase is. If you have the experience, on the other hand, they expect you to work for an entry-level wage.
I can't help but think that switching to partial or full working from home will seriously complicate the job of training new employees. A lot of training is by osmosis, simply day to day watching what others do to pick up norms and informal methods. To the extent that remote working is effective now IHMO we're relying on the past investment in person-to-person training.
I disagree.
The "by osmosis" method you mention is actually a critical lack of management skill. If your firm can't figure out how to train people, that's your firm's problem and you'd better figure it out. There are skills and methods for doing this, whether in-person or remote. The firms that had a good handle on in-person training are also the firms that figured out how to have a good handle on remote training. The firms that didn't have a good handle on in-person training are those that are complaining the loudest about how people don't want to come back into the office.
This is a remarkable oversimplification.
Perhaps in your line of work, formal training programs provide all of the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful, but at least in my work, learning-by-doing-with-guidance is absolutely necessary, and that guidance is simply more effective in person. 100% remote positions can work in my field, but only if the individual is already knowledgeable about the work they are doing (and won't be involved in training and guiding their less knowledgeable colleagues).
Can you give me an example of something you can train the novice in your field to do in person, but can't train that person to do via Zoom call and/or remote whiteboard?
Very often, the 'learn by doing with guidance' training plan actually represents a total lack of effort and investment in training by the company.
When 'learn by doing with guidance' is a real training plan with investment, oversight and measurables, this is easy to convert to remote training.
When 'learn by doing with guidance' is actually a cover for the lack of any actual training, this is ineffective both in person and online.
Absolutely. The water fountain is a Fount of Knowledge.
Credential inflation and difficulty finding a job is a thing. However, I have difficulty squaring the age discrimination circle when those 45 and older have consistently had a lower unemployment rates than other age cohorts and -- due to the US' aging demographics -- there is an historically large percentage of older workers making up the workforce.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=3029#snid=3062
The EEOC reports only about 12k Age Discrimination claims in 2022 (out of more than 40 million 45+ in the workforce) with less than a third having merit.
https://www.eeoc.gov/data/age-discrimination-employment-act-charges-filed-eeoc-includes-concurrent-charges-title-vii-ada
There was some popular Twitter thread recently I read about somewhere where a guy had newspaper articles back to 1894 on the theme "nobody wants to work anymore".
Twas always thus.
In the early 1920's Ty Cobb complained about the "new generation of ballplayers like Babe Ruth" who don't want to take the trouble to learn "the real skills" of the game; they just want to bash the ball and trot around the bases.
Hey! Ty Cobb was just in the news today!
Sadly, he was just one of The Defendent's former lawyers.
The Defendant in Chief!
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise," the first recorded crank, Socrates.
Lest we forget, Socrates was ordered to commit suicide because he supposedly taught the youth of Athens to vandalize a bunch of statues by (wait for it...) knocking the penises off the statues.
If you read between the lines, employers have raised expectations of minimum skills a starting (bottom rung) job entails.
This. They don't want to pay people to learn on the job. It hurts their bottom line.
"years of remote learning during the pandemic"
Years? Give me a break! Who edits this shit?
It may have been Kevin who asked this back at his old blog but he had pointed out, I think sometime in the early aughts that the "Nation at Risk" report came out in the early 80s and one would have thought having all these stupid kids around would have affected the country in some fashion and the reality was, for all that educational "sucking" for so long, you have way more foreign students attending U.S. colleges than vise-versa.
In other words, same old people, same old complaint.
"one would have thought having all these stupid kids around would have affected the country in some fashion"
I believe that it has; the 2016 election is just the most glaring example of mass stupidity.
Technically, "the 2016 election is the most glaring example of mass stupidity AMONG SELFISH OLD PEOPLE." There, FIFY.
Right-wingers are going to be complaining about the one year of school closings - which the WSJ now calls "years" - forever. COVID mitigation measures will be like the Bork nomination.
The fact is that if employers want employees to be trained, they are going to have to spend the time & money to train their employees. I don't see any reason why anyone else should be doing it.
There is a plausible alternative that sometimes works quite well.
A little less emphasis on the universal value of a Baccalaureate, and a little more on the career options using the local Community College, can put a lot of young folks into the marketplace with a better start on a good career.
THIS! Ten times. Plus two.
Heard that from a Voc-Ed superintendent years ago. GM trained their own people and engineers at General Motors Institute, long since spun off to Kettering University. Same with skilled trades.
Now they expect the community colleges and universities to do all that for them, on the college's and student's dime.
I think this is largely the phenomenon you describe, Kevin, but I'll say I've heard from many friends in education that their students are still not able to function at the level expected of them prior to the pandemic. Not learning-loss wise, but just "focusing in class and following generally accepted norms of behavior"-wise.
One college instructor I know had a student last fall miss a test due to being sick, and when the instructor reached out to her about rescheduling the test, the student couldn't believe she was being asked to take a test she missed. "No, I was out sick!" My instructor friend points to this as an example of the relatively common surprise her students express at being asked to do things that would never have warranted comment in the past.
Obviously this is anecdotal, but I've heard stories like this from several acquaintances in different parts of the education arena (middle school and high school as well as college). Now that these students are entering the workforce, I'm not surprised if there is something to these employer complaints (even though, again, I think it's mostly "old man shakes fist at cloud").
It's not just remote education (though that's part of it) - the acute phase of the pandemic was incredibly disruptive during a developmentally critical part of these people's lives. I'd be shocked if there *weren't* this kind of impact.
To be honest, I think the kids these days are if anything better prepared and more skilled than the kids of my generation (including me). Increased interaction with adults and the internet help. And they are learning things at an earlier age in school. Employers should be happy about this. But, as capitalists, their business model is always wanting to pay less and get more...
Back in the day, wasn't there some counter to this employer tendency? Where workers would get together en masse and demand better? Higher wages, better working conditions, time off with pay, and so forth? It sounds like a really good idea...
Starts with a "U" I think...
I've been reading variations of the same "kids graduating these days don't want to work/are entitled/have no skills" for the past 20+ years that it's impossible to take any of it seriously. It's just the usual generational griping that makes the older readers of these publications happy.
I'm about the same age as Kevin, and I'm fairly certain I've been reading those stories for pretty much 60 years. Of course, when I was a kid in the hippie era there was a certain amount of truth to the claim that the kids didn't want to work; not a huge amount of truth, because the hippies weren't that high a percentage of the youth population, but some truth.
Kids today have lousy work skills?
What about my generation?
OK lets go back and see what these lousy skills produced just in my lifetime
We went from black and white TVs to color to cable TV to streaming TV.
We went from cathode ray tubes, to digital displays
How about computers that had 128G of storage on the Lunar Landing module? We now have MUCH LARGER capacity on our cell phones thats attached to our hips
Our cars? Lighter, more nimble much better gas mileage
Never mind all the advances in science and medicine that we've made
Yeah, we didn't have the skills everyone was looking for.
And todays job searchers don't either. But lets ask those same unskilled job seekers the same question 50 years down the road.
I don't think we have too much to worry about
Um, that wasn't "G" that was "K" and it was "2" (of addressable RAM) and "38" of them not "128" of storage memory. The intertubes could have told you this in seven seconds at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#:~:text=using%20more%20gates.-,Memory,cycle%20times%20of%2011.72%20microseconds.
eh, it's hard to remember details of something I saw while in 'Nam. I think I saw it on a recording.
it was still a thrilling moment.
but compared with today's tech? the lunar landing module was child's play
I was thinking that had to be a typo. The first mainframe class computer I worked with at DEC starting in 1974 had a thundering 512K of memory. (It WAS a little long in the tooth, we got newer models with more memory pretty shortly.)
Or, it could be the Fox News Journal chumming the waters for Ronito DeSantolini. It's, your call.
“Young people are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
Aristotle
4th Century BC