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.
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’ve never hired anyone. I understand having to train new employees, but that is after they have been hired. How is the interview held? Does it go into enough depth to know if someone can do what is required, and who determines someone’s soft skills and are they even important?
I'd been an electronics tinkerer for a dozen years before getting into my Jr/Sr EE courses. By that time I was working in one of the EE labs as a technician, and one of the PhD students there was a mentor.
But this guy was the exact opposite of your stereotypical grad student. He'd been repairing TVs and such since his early teens; he didn't have too much respect for those highly "edjumicated" (his word) engineers who "didn't know which end of a soldering iron to pick up" (his words again).