Posted on 10/12/2011 5:08:06 PM PDT by decimon
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. manufacturers are failing to fill thousands of vacant jobs, surprising when 14 million people are searching for work.
Technology giant Siemens Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany's Siemens AG , has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills.
Other companies report job vacancies that range from six to 200, with some positions open for at least nine months.
Manufacturing is hurt by a dearth of skilled workers.
"What we have been saying for quite a while is that even though there is a high unemployment rate, it's very difficult to find skilled people," said Jeff Owens, president of ATS, a manufacturing consulting services company.
A survey by ManpowerGroup found that a record 52 percent of U.S. employers have difficulty filling critical positions within their organizations -- up from 14 percent in 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I started to notice about twenty years ago that companies write very detailed descriptions of requirements that almost no one could possibly have all the requirements. The first screener of all resumes are made by a human resources admin that doesn’t understand a word they are reading and throws out those that don’t have ALL the correct words.
#1 thing I see that young people don’t have that manufacturing shops need are people who understand shop math.
That includes trig.
If someone doesn’t know trig, they have no business in a machine shop, unless they’re simply loading a pallet on a CNC machine and hitting the green button.
You would not believe how many kids get out of high school without geometry or trig.
But they know all about how to put condoms on just about anything that moves.
It seems to me that, if there are millions of unemployed people and businesses with jobs to fill, but can’t fill them due to not finding people with right skills, that implies a failure of the education system to create skillful people.
It also seems to me that the economy is suggesting that the solution isn’t for businesses to wait for the right people, but that businesses should be involved in creating the right people.
Hire them and train them, then take the tax breaks for training people.
It’s probably true.
What has happened over the last 50 years is that businesses have gotten out of training people. They want people to absorb all of the cost, and risk, of getting training and be able to hit the ground running.
It’s very short sighted and a disservice to everybody.
This is just about the H1-Bs.
This is the #1 problem I see in companies today. They have a HR department, and the HR department is using software to scan resumes for human evaluation. The software cleans out anything that isn’t a perfect buzzword match.
Example: I’ve been programming computers since I was 15. I know and have programming in something like 14 languages, not including assemblers.
Do I know all the ins and outs of (I’m going to pick a fashionable recent language) Ruby on Rails? No.
Can I learn it? Yes, in less than a week. After you’ve done as many programming languages as I have, they’re all either re-writes of Pascal/C or Lisp, pick one. Ruby is, I’m sure, just a re-spin of Lisp. All these modern nifty languages are efforts by kids today to make Lisp without the (...) syntax, with the exception of SmallTalk-80. And then there are some languages that are basically re-spins of SmallTalk. Perl always looked like a morphadite mash-up of SNOBOL and Rexx to me, but WTF, right? For many of the Unix crowd, they’re convinced that there were no other languages on mainframes than COBOL.
But for the HR departments... oh, no, that’s not good enough.
I went off on one of our HR people when I worked in the valley. She wrote up a job opening posting that required “three to five years programming Java.” I pointed out that Java had not been out for more than a couple years at that point. She said that was the requirement. I said “Bullcrap” and whipped my phone off the cradle (and I almost never used my phone), called up the hiring manager... who said “WTF?!!” and he went off on the HR drone too. He wanted a position filled, and he was never going to fill it with a posting like that.
Oh, that got me sidewise with HR management - I was “picking on” this poor woman, you see.
I replied that I had a reputation of picking on stupid people.
That really lit things up right there, lemme tell you.
Well, my 2 cents is that I started working for siemens energy in jan. 2011. It is a very good company to work for so far. They do pay well also. They are still looking for people for an expansion that is happening. You have to go thru a series of tests and interviews, but, if you know your field, you`ll make it...
Well, one of my skills is that exactly, held that position many times...They are still some of us around..Take care
Here are a couple of links for those inquiring:
http://www.siemenscharlottecareers.com/index.cfm
http://www.usa.siemens.com/entry/en/index.htm
Hope this helps :)
Yes, math is such a lost skill anymore! In college, I worked part-time as a math tutor, and usually was teaching what they should have learned in 6th grade.
I was amazed during a recent training class at work, I had to help a dozen people figure out how to dial the phone. I don’t mean just how to get an outside line, I mean how to dial, period! They kept looking for the “menu” button.
“”Impossible Job Qualifications”? And just what would those qualifications be that only foreign workers have? And if there is a legitimacy to your claim then why don’t Americans have those qualifications and who’s fault is that?”
This is a very common trick - to basically tailor the job opening to the very particular set of skills possessed by the H1B applicant that they have in mind has , no matter how weird, useless and/or obscure/obsolete (Java, Cobol, Oracle running on Netware AND CICS, and so on) - and then no one except the H1B applicant has those skills, so they can be hired. I can easily identify these bogus job postings. Only the foolish respond. The company hopes that no one does anyway.
The southern states are pretty good at education of factory workers in there community colleges...a lot of the auto industry got started in the south with the agreement that the state would train x number of people in a trade need in the auto industry...thus when the plant was built people were available..
I went off on one of our HR people when I worked in the valley. She wrote up a job opening posting that required “three to five years programming Java.”
A common idiocy. I laughed with my friends in the 90’s about a Visual Basic position requiring 5+ years of experience in VB. I had been using a private beta copy of Visual Basic 1.0 three years earlier.
On the other hand, I once interviewed with a company who challenged my resume’s statement, “I have used almost all publicly available dialects of BASIC”. So, the president of the company asked me if I had used Axolotl (or whatever) BASIC. I looked dumbfounded and sheepishly said that I had never even heard of it, much less used it. He responded “Good - because I just made it up”. I got the job offer.
Your joking, right?
Your joking, right?
That’s what it was a month or so ago when my brother mentioned it, at least.
There is a reason your brother hasn't been able to hire a PHP programer. The salary/bonus is too low..
That wasn’t the salary, that was just the hiring bonus. I don’t remember the exact salary but I believe it was in the $30+ per hour range.
I remember comparing the salary to the average for php programmers, and it was just a shade higher than the average. But, that conversation was over a month ago. Still, the $5000 was just the hiring bonus.
Great story. You are right, HR people in general are IDIOTS, put there by lazy management so that they really don’t have to manage. It’s a racket.
The other reason IMO is that they don’t want those jobs filled. Why would they when the have the hired schmuck to work a little overtime to get it done? And they keep telling him that ‘no just seems to want the job Bill, but we’re trying to fill it’.
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