Posted on 10/01/2012 8:32:58 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It isn't just high tech positions in American manufacturing that aren't being filled. The consultant company Deloitte surveyed the industry and found 600,000 perfectly good jobs going unfilled because of a lack of "soft skills."
What are soft skills?
Wall Street Journal:
At a recent dinner in Washington, D.C., with representatives from major American manufacturing companies, I listened as the talk turned to how hard it is to find qualified applicants for jobs.
"What exactly are the skills you can't find?" I asked, imagining that openings for high-tech positions went begging because, as we hear so often, the training of the U.S. workforce doesn't match up well with current corporate needs.
One of the representatives looked sheepishly around the room and responded: "To be perfectly honest . . . we have a hard time finding people who can pass the drug test." Several other reps gave a knowing nod. Applicants were often so underqualified, they said, that simply finding someone who could properly answer the telephone was sometimes a challenge.
[...]
American manufacturing has become more advanced, we're told, and requires computer aptitude, intricate problem solving, and greater dexterity with complex tasks. Surely if Americans were getting STEM education, they would have the skills they need to get jobs in our modern, high-tech economy.
But considerable evidence suggests that many employers would be happy just to find job applicants who have the sort of "soft" skills that used to be almost taken for granted. In the Manpower Group's 2012 Talent Shortage Survey, nearly 20% of employers cited a lack of soft skills as a key reason they couldn't hire needed employees. "Interpersonal skills and enthusiasm/motivation" were among the most commonly identified soft skills that employers found lacking.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I read a recent article that claimed that many companies have fired most of their HR people and are trying to get by with software. (maybe that is what you are referring to).
Mechanics can make very good money.
I don’t know anything about that, that would be even worse.
Next time you might give him his chance to stop the pipe.
It was posted here within the past couple of months. Not sure how to find it now. Introduced me to the term “looking for a unicorn”.
Quick... Import more employees dt stupid Americans. Do ya think anyone noticed we don’t pay ss and other taxes related to hiring Americans? Nah! Pure coincidence
If you ever have hired someone fresh out of college, you basically have to train them all over again for your particular field of interest. I’ve had to train freshly minted electrical engineers, who couldn’t even read a schematic, let alone tell me what the purpose of a particular circuit was. I had to teach them how to use a multimeter, an oscilliscope, a logic analyser, and understand the information they were looking at. College only arms you with the theories and formulas, the real education begins with your first real job. My job was to find the shiny diamonds in the rough, and make them productive and creative. It was roughly a 10 to 1 ratio.
English skills are a prerequisite for writing. The author should make a distinguishable point and state it in the first paragraph as a thesis. Otherwise, the column won’t get the attention desired by the publisher.
I read the whole thing. The author lacked experience in and knowledge about manufacturing, and he made no distinguishable point. The piece was all over the place.
Manufacturing is going down in the USA, because our leadership is saturated with social pathologies and lacking in leadership skills (unhealthy sex practices, drugs, anti-American attitudes, anti-family, etc.). It’s comprised of pretentious social trash.
I told my guys, when I was a manager, I would fire half of them for three of him, never seen many people like him, must be his Polock blood, kind of thick headed though, stubborn.
Horrible.
A long time ago there was a truism that whats good for business in good for America. I don’t believe thats so at all any longer. Not pointing the finger at anyone although there are some who deserve finger pointing like that guy you luckily never worked for. The fact is all the incentives are to pay less because cost’s such as health care go up yearly. If your company covers your health care and continues to do so well there was your raise. Another factor is companies can hire cheaper overseas and aren’t shy about doing so.
There’s a serious common sense deficit in America.
I once had a kid mangle his fingers when he did exactly what I specifically told him not to do and even showed him why (Not to mention the printed warning right in his line of sight)
The job was a simple matter of buffing the inner diameter of solenoid coils with a wire brush on a drill press. I told him to do it barehanded or wear a leather glove because the brush would catch the cloth glove and tear him up. I even showed the kid what happens with a cloth glove.
10 minutes later he was on his way to the hospital. One of the old timers said that when I hired in I was dumb like any new hire but the kids today are mostly dangerously stupid.
The people in his former Florida district need to thank their lucky stars he’s on an obscure TV network and not [mis]representing them.
Opps. posted to wrong thread.
The lack of grammar skills is regularly shown around FR and this site has the best of the best. Very depressing.
How willing are they to hire an age 50-something employee for more than minimum wage?
Don’t forget the healthy doses of self-esteem.
Yep.
Oddly the number one way to insure that no one wants to hire you is be an engineer over age 55.
Apparently that is one soft skill utterly repugnant to companies.
Government has been reforming and re-reforming education for forty years or more. The reforms undertaken in the past are a significant part of the problem. How about a return to real educational standards rather than a mish-mash of politically correct policies designed to pretend that differences in the abilities of students don't really exist.
And no combination of government programs will change that ratio.
And if they refuse to look for the 1 in 10 they will never find him. And if theyt luck into a 1 in 10er and don’t take steps to keep him they are very foolish.
I told him if I saw him about to get killed I wouldn't say a word or try and pull him out of the way.
His attitude changed real fast.
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