Posted on 10/12/2009 1:20:11 PM PDT by blam
At 10% Unemployment America Still Doesn't Have Enough Workers
Joe Weisenthal
Oct. 12, 2009, 1:10 PM
Here's a little paradox for you. Even with unemployment officially sitting around 10%, studies continue to suggest that America is deficient when it comes to having a skilled workforce.
A new survey by the Business Roundtable finds that many businesses say they can't get as skilled-enough workforce for what they need. Remember, we're in the middle of period where there's a record number of jobseekers for every listing.
But of course, it's really not much a paradox at all. After years and years of a housing bubble, we have millions of Americans trained in some capacity relating to housing, and those skills are no longer needed. Concepts like this should shred anyone's notion of an output gap. Sure, American hands are underutilized, but if those hands don't have anything to do that's productive, can they really be considered unused "capacity." No, they can't.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Got housing skills?
Too bad.
One of the problems is that employers want to hire specialists, instead of generalists. We see this especially in IT.
Keep handing out welfare, ACORN mortgages, etc and people who are incapable of supporting themselves will have more babies.
The Democrats need the illegals to bring Mexican style governance to America, Odumbo's real plan.
I agree with GFWGATOR ,, plenty of qualified people .. I gave up on IT about 10 years ago ,, I had decades of experience in what employers needed but didn’t have 5 years experience on a product that was only out for 3 years,, of course nobody did but the HB1 people always had whatever contradictory set of skills were in the req... coincidence? screw ‘em .
I remember one idiot interviewed during the G20 complaining that he was stuck living at home in a very well to do Pittsburgh suburb because he was unable to get a job with his college degrees in Art History and Asian Design.
Now, how many of these people are unemployed because they have absolutely worthless degrees?
They also want to hire slave labor green card workers.
You’re right he should have taken philosophy.
Prove it.
Instead of dealing in these sweeping generalities, why not provide information stating where all these unfilled jobs are: What industries, what companies, what job description, what are the qualifications, where are the jobs located? Create a nationwide job bank so people can access and learn of all these openings.
Anybody can play games with sweeping generalities. What they might really mean is: get me some foreigners who know don't complain like these Americans, or any number of other bogus reasons for wanting foreign workers.
Here’s an anecdote, when interviewing for what became my current position, PHP was considered essential. Ok, I kinda, sorta knew PHP, read a book on it somewhere back. But the recruiter insisted that PHP was a must.
Fast forward four years, and I have yet to write a line of PHP code. Plenty of Java, Flex and .NET, though.
Unless you're becoming a Lawyer, Doctor, etc. a college degree really just shows a perspective employer that you started something & saw it through to completion, IMHO.
I mean, I worked with a guy that had an advanced degree ( I do not) that asked me what deplorable meant. True story.
The dims don’t workers that speak the language.
They just want workers that vote dim.
The answer is simple enough.
We need to switch our philosophy of everyone having a college degree, which has lowered the education level of degreed persons and the value of having a degree, to one of truly believing that there is a place for everyone in our Nation.
Once that occurs, I’m sure we will have no problem in instituting the proper courses in lower levels of education to include a path for those who would rather work with theirs hands and backs, and God given and self developed talents and skills.
thanks a lot US government democrat/republicans for ruining the US labor market and contributing to the economic failure
In my business (architecture), things have been very slow. The national architect billing index is down again this month. A while back, I had a young man help me put together feasibilty reports for clients. However, even with spellcheck his writing was horrible. This college-educated nincompoop would pick three different spellings for the same word (their) despite the different meanings. Although I proofread his typing, clients were still finding spelling and grammatical errors, which was especially embarrassing with foreign-born clients. Considering every third word out of his mouth was ‘like’, I wish him luck in the current job market. Like, you know.
“One of the problems is that employers want to hire specialists, instead of generalists. We see this especially in IT.”
Boy oh boy, isn’t that the truth! I consider myself a technical generalist and work well with disparte groups (like software engineers and sales engineers) that don’t always see eye-to-eye even though their long term goals are the same. I’m going into my seventh month of being unemployed after six years in the IT field (level 1 support of an enterprise data center, production acceptance coordinator, technical writer) and everyone is looking for specialists only. My original field was manufacturing but that’s been severely depleted. And the online classifieds are littered with ‘work-from-home’ scams and commission-only sales for dubious companies.
Must stay positive! Must stay positive!
You get what you pay for.
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