The "skills gap" myth

bnt

There's an interesting interview on the IEEE Spectrum podcast, transcribed on the on the website, which confirms what I have suspected for a while, about how a "skills gap" can exist alongside high unemployment among the highly-educated. It's a follow-up to a WSJ piece on the same topic a few months ago by the interviewee, Dr. Peter Cappelli.

It comes down to this: the "skills gap" exists due to inflexibility, unrealistic expectations, and poor hiring procedures on the part of employers. There's too much box-ticking on the one hand, and the expectation of "plug and play" employees. If HR can receive 10,000 CVs for one position, yet find no-one who can do the job, there's something very wrong there.

So the shortfall is in those people who can plug and play—that is, they can come right into our company and immediately contribute, because we don’t have time or resources to train or give them time for on boarding up-skilling that you’d get just by hanging around and getting used to the job. We can’t do that, so you’ve got to be able to do the job perfectly from day one. The only people that can do that are people who are currently doing the same job someplace else. So it’s obviously pretty hard to find people if that’s your definition—if you say, “We want to hire people, and they’ve got to be doing the job right now”—because as you’ve probably heard, a lot of employers won’t accept applications from people who are currently unemployed. So basically we’re saying we’ve got to hire from our competitors. And you know what? There is kind of a shortage of people if you say, “You’ve got to be working for one of our competitors doing exactly the same thing you’re doing now. That’s what we want, and it’s hard to find those people.” Well, it’s probably true, but that’s not a skills gap.

My view: I can appreciate the employer's position since they have to tighten the job requirements to reduce the number of CVs they receive. Handling CVs is a business cost that they need to minimise. That excludes people who are capable of doing the job with a little help - they just aren't doing that exact job already. Then, if they find someone, they can't offer (much) training, since that costs money, directly and indirectly (in lost time). Then, if you were to train someone up, they might get poached by another company who's able to pay more because they haven't invested in training!

It's a race to the bottom, but if employers are going to solve this "skills gap", they're going to have to do more genuine "investing in people" - and I don't mean the hypocritical "investing in people" mottos you occasionally see. It wouldn't have to be one-sided: ask the employee to sign a long-term contract in exchange, with penalty or clawback clauses, which removes the risk of poaching.

But that highlights another, related problem: the inability of employers to make long-term plans. I would happily sign a three-year contract at a modest salary, in exchange for a defined career path and training - but can any company guarantee that they'll still be in business, or the same business or location, for the next three years? It would give them less flexibility to hire and fire lay off for short-term gain, such as meeting quarterly targets.

In summary: employers facing a "skills gap" are going to have to fix it themselves, by investing in training over the long term. They aren't going to get what they need directly from schools and universities, or by poaching from other companies forever. It means a return to the idea that the hiring process is about spotting potential rather than filling a tightly-defined role. It's not an exercise in keyword filtering or box-checking, with the expectation that hiring a new employee is like changing the cartridge in a printer. In return, they can gain employees who will invest in them over the long term, rather than jump ship at the first whiff of a better paycheck. :cool:

Turbulent Bill

The worst thing is that the "skills gap" is repeated verbatim by politicians, educators etc. without any real analysis of whether it's valid. Employers will of course complain of not having enough potential employees - it's in their interest to have as big a pool of candidates as possible, and it keeps salary levels down.

Poor recruitment practices are another bugbear, i.e., badly-advertised jobs that waste both candidates' and employers' time.

JRant

In the past it seemed that once one had recieved their degree they were seen as having some sort of basic level of competence that a company could then improve upon with internal training. Today however we have a situation where companies want graduates coming out of college with all the skills they require so they can immediately start making money of that persons back. No training being given, no incentive for the employee to stay as your only a number on a spreadsheet, absolutely no job security and companies wonder why people jump ship at the first chance of a higher pay-cheque.

I've also witnessed first hand how our college degree programs are being tailored for industry and not student needs. The raft of changes implemented to engineer programs at the behest of Engineers Ireland in the past number of years has been purely to satisfy employers needs. With core engineering subjects taking a back seat to more and more Business/Management nonsense.

JRant

Turbulent Bill wrote: »

The worst thing is that the "skills gap" is repeated verbatim by politicians, educators etc. without any real analysis of whether it's valid. Employers will of course complain of not having enough potential employees - it's in their interest to have as big a pool of candidates as possible, and it keeps salary levels down.

Poor recruitment practices are another bugbear, i.e., badly-advertised jobs that waste both candidates' and employers' time.

It's a lot like this "smart" economy rubbish that gets rolled out straight after a mention of a "skills gap". To have a smart economy we would first need to have smart people running the economy with some business insight/foresight and the testicular fortitude to implement it. For instance, in the case of both wind and wave energy you could not pick a better location than Ireland's west coast on the entire planet. Yet we refuse to spend money developing wave farm facilities, especially for prototype testing, when we could truly become a world leader in such a technology.