When private industry greed prevents it from supporting community training and job skills, the community (Government) i.e. the people must unite, standup and do for themselves. In every great recession only a few businessmen are knowledgeable enough to realize a paradigm shift is needed to save a nation from total economic collapse. The majority will remain vigilante to an inherited grandiose profit motive mentally void of a need to retrain and retool.
In the chart below, the orange line represents the number of unemployed people looking for work; the white line represents the number of job openings.
Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that companies have trouble finding qualified applicants. (For example, there’s a shortage of welders.) Across the broader economy, though, the data do not hold up. Annual wage increases have been stuck at around 2 percent; they’d be rising much faster if there were a shortage of qualified workers.
Something is clearly broken in the labor market. The problem may not be the skills workers ostensibly lack. It may be that employers’ expectations are out of whack. That’s the premise of a paper by Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School. For much of the twentieth century, it was up to industry to pluck smart, capable college graduates and turn them into quality workers. In recent decades, on-the-job training has declined. Companies want new hires to be able to “hit the ground running."
..."In 2011, an Accenture (ACN) survey of U.S. employees found that only 21 percent had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years. “That means almost 80 percent had no training in five years,” Cappelli wrote." - Businessweek
Meanwhile, career and technical education (CTE) has declined in favor of
traditional four-year colleges. The average number of CTE credits taken
per student fell by half from 2000 to 2005.
Knowledge is Key
