Posted on 01/16/2013 7:10:51 AM PST by SeekAndFind
As each month’s unemployment figures show only modest declines, some may mistakenly believe that the United States has a “jobs crisis.” But a closer analysis of the data reveals that our fundamental challenge is a lack of skills, not jobs.
I made this observation at the recent STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Summit convened by the Daily News. But don’t take my word for it. Look at the January 2013 New York City Real Time Jobs Report, which lists local employers that posted the most new ads in the past 90 days and the number of opportunities available.
The current edition of this report documents the existence of more than 300,000 unfilled jobs in the city. My company, IBM, ranked sixth on the list with nearly 1,000 unfilled jobs in New York City alone. JPMorgan Chase led the way with more than 2,000 unfilled positions, and AT&T and Citigroup together had more than 2,000 careers in search of qualified personnel.
A deeper look at the jobs report numbers indicates that 30% of the vacancies — the largest single category — were in the professional, scientific and technical services sector. This is conclusive proof that a focus on preparing our young people for careers in these fields is the crucial economic challenge of our time.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
My son got a relatively generic business degree, and started out putting tires on cars at a tire store because that’s all he could find. Nine months later he was hired on to run shipping operations at a large plumbing/HVAC wholesaler. It’s not really high-skilled, and it’s not paying a huge salary. But it’s a good company and it’s a start. I really believe he would not have the job he does if he’d just been working a retail counter or in a restaurant. It was more that he showed that he is a steady, reliable employee willing to work hard and get his hands dirty in addition to having some smarts.
Good jobs of all types are out there. Good employees? Maybe not so much.
People need to develop a knowledge and skills portfolio that is just as diversified as a financial portfolio. We need to start emphasizing this in school....you can’t just spend all of your time studying and training to do one thing.
Now we are being told that we need to bring in hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to do jobs Americans can't do.
In the meantime, we have 23 million Americans looking for fulltime employment and 50% of college graduates age 25-29 can't find jobs in their field.
We are a nation of 315 million people and we can't educate and train enough people to fill 4.8 million STEM jobs?
We can make everything here, but still, automation means that it won’t create nearly as many jobs as it used to. Look at how many people used to be employed in agriculture, what used to take hundreds of people to do, can now be accomplished with a handful........now agriculture employment amounts to around 1 percent, where in the past it was at least 60%.
Same down here in the SE NM oil patch - an estimated 20% fail and random* drug tests for existing employees catch more.
But there are loads of help wanted ads for skilled employees, mainly trades persons -- welders, machinists, electricians. And IT is becoming more important as companies go to remote technology to collect production data from their remote locations.
* Last year I got called off a job just before the end of the day and told to report to the medical center to pee in the cup. There was a line waiting to do the same.
The time is quickly approaching where there will no longer be people who do nothing but programming, it will just be another aspect of their normal job. Think about accountants who write their own Excel Macros, eventually that will expand to more conventional types of programming.
It’ll still employ more people than at present.
I started out in ‘83 as a COBOL IMS programmer. One of the great things about it is that that single skill springboarded me to a very lucrative career without having to contend with competing tech. Sure, I had to learn CICS in the early 90’s, but CICS is to IMS DC what Ford is to Chevy. It’s so similar that it was a piece of cake.
But then the world of servers and all to 4th generation languages popped up. It got so there may be lots of jobs were out there, but only a handful were for your “specific” skillset. But us Cobol guys just kept grinding away. $27 an hour. $35 an hour. $45 an hour. Then $55, $75 and, finally, $125 an hour. And it was then that the influx of immigrants started impacting the Mainframe programming world.
It still pays pretty well if you are an old timer, but I moved on to communication intensive stuff (i.e. BA and PM). That is harder to outsource - with the equivalent pay deflation. ;-)
I used to say to kids in the early 90’s that iin the future, you can’t say one of these things, you will not be able to afford your own home:
1. I own my own company.
2. I’m in sales.
3. You can’t pull a person of average intelligence off the street and teach them my job in a month.
And none of those three are a guarantee.
Excel Macros, eventually that will expand to more conventional types of programming.
My skills with Microsoft Office are, to me, nothing special, but I’ve worked on contracts where they thought I was an MS Office guru. You would not believe how many people use MS Office daily but don’t even know what a macro is.
They’re not dumb. They’re just too busy doing their job and using it the way they use it to realize the functionality is there and may help them. I used Word macros to remediate Microfocus COBOL code for Y2K. It was easy, but I’d almost have to re-learn it today to do it now. Actually, I’d probably have to fiddle with it for an hour or so. ;-)
What’s worse, 20% less employees or 20% employees that use drugs on the weekends or after work?
Not very many STEM jobs can justify the salaries paid to top STEM graduates working in finance. There really wouldn’t be much point to outbidding finance firms for such above-market-wage STEM jobs anyway.
Plain old market supply and demand works very well, thank you.
Right On! Right On! Right On!
I teach and tutor math and science in rural Minnesota which has a reputation as being one of the best educated populations in the nation and I find that scary as...
You would be astonished at how many young people cannot manipulate even small signed integer numbers. Fractions are beyond comprehension.
The school systems do, however, provide enormous bandwidth to play computer games when they are supposed to be working.
The primary function of our educational system is babysitting.
No, the primary function of our education system is indoctrination.
Good question. "Tested positive" does not always mean "under the influence and unable to safely do the job."
The chickens are coming home to roost. In the 80’s it was all high tech manfacturing jobs, engineers were in high demand, and students went to school to learn those skills. Enter the 90’s, when all of those engineers and skilled trades watched their jobs get shipped to china and mexico by the ‘effin boatload, and were told you can’t compete against cheap foriegn labor, so get used to it because those jobs are never coming back. So through the 2000’s foreign interests gobbled up US manufacturing while the people here were sold on getting degrees in bullshit fields, all along colleges making money hand over fist by peddling useless dergrees, and perpetuating the myth that you have to go to them to get a toehold in a lucrative job. The quest for profits at all costs has cost our industrial infrastructure dearly, and that has reprecussions to future generations who have lost the ability to make, grow, and build things for themselves.
"Do these pants make me look fat?"
"No, your ass makes you look fat."
You are missing the point and only using part of the professor's assertion, "There are a lot of skilled workers who have been lured out of the not-very-well-paid STEM occupations to work in high finance and elsewhere, and he suggests that an increase in wages would bring many back into STEM activities."
It is false choice to say that you either increase STEM wages to compete against those working in high finance or just allow STEM jobs to go unfilled.
Plain old market supply and demand works very well, thank you.
The problem is that it is not a level playing field. We are importing cheaper labor to fill many STEM jobs, which depresses wages across the board in those fields. And there is an endless supply of cheap, skilled labor from abroad. Our immigration policies bear no correlation to our real job needs.
During the past four years, the average household income has declined by $4,500 or almost 10%. If there was truly a shortage of labor, skilled or unskilled, we would see wages increasing. They are not. They are actually going down and have been for decades.
Except the “Bill Gates” billionaires lie to Congress and say there aren’t enough qualified Americans willing to do the work, can ‘we’ get some work visas (and here’s $10,000 to the government for each employee we are giving half-wages)?
Not to mention the offshore workers who then smuggle their foreign authored million dollar code into the US via the internet without paying importation taxes.
Not enough skilled workers my ass. A degree won’t keep your job stateside with upper management trying to shave off dollars.
The McCormick reaper put thousands of farm hands out of business. What happened to them?
Humans adjust.
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