In wandering out today I stumbled across an old Wall Street Journal op-ed that has transmogrified into a new book. The thesis of both is that the claim of a skills mismatch is bogus and the key problem is with employers. Either they have unrealistically low expectations of what they’ll need to pay for specific skillsets or they’ve just forgotten how to hire and train employees. Here’s the nub:
Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can’t get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That’s an affordability problem, not a skill shortage. A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages. We wouldn’t say there is a shortage of diamonds when they are incredibly expensive; we can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.
The real problem, then, is more appropriately an inflexibility problem. Finding candidates to fit jobs is not like finding pistons to fit engines, where the requirements are precise and can’t be varied. Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.
To my ear this has something of a ring of truth.
This makes sense. In 2007 we had very low unemployment. People were willing to work when it was available. Talking with high school kids and my son’s college buddies it is quite clear they are concerned about jobs and are piling in to the areas they hope we will have jobs available. I also still think there are some people unable to move to new jobs because of their underwater homes, though the evidence for this not been as forthcoming as I thought.
Steve
Drew’s an investor type who started out as an engineer. I’m a writer who started off as a waiter. Dave is a . . . well, no one quite knows what the hell you are, exactly, Dave,* because you never give yourself a title, but I’m sure you’re not directly qualified in a way that would convince and HR department. I don’t think the smart, creative companies hire with such rigid specificity. I don’t think Apple says, “You’ve made on/off buttons before? Okay, you can be our on/off button guy.”
*My version is that you drive to various businesses — opera playing on the car stereo — go in, look around and say, “Yeah, you’re doing it wrong, pull your head out of your ass and do it like this. Now, here’s my invoice.”
Capelli’s book is definitely making the rounds in the circles in which I’m active. I think he’s a little too simplistic about the skills gap, but absolutely right that companies could and should help solve the problem by getting better at training and development. Too many executives think that if you have to train someone they’re not worth hiring in the first place, but frankly, they don’t know, because close to nobody looks at the ROI of internal training programs.
And those companies that do invest heavily in training people up often do very well.
Engineer to small business manger to specialized lender to manager/investor.
And told every step of the way Id never make it happen. To be fair, a different degree came in the middle of that. Oddly, the very same institution where I several years later became a lender dinged me during the interview process for……….effectively skills mismatch.