07.02.11
The alleged ‘skills’ gap
Today’s bit of tripe from the business wire continues the received wisdom that mass unemployment is caused by a skills gap. Americans are stupid slobs, the story implies, completely unskilled for the work crying out to be done in the corporate shops of our formerly go-go nation.
John Russo’s chemical lab in North Kingstown has been growing in recent years, even despite a deflated economy, and he expects to add another 15 to 20 positions to his 49 employees over the next year.
But the president of Ultra Scientific Analytical Solutions has found himself in a vexing spot, struggling to fill openings that require specialized training …
“It’s very difficult to find the right person, and there’s all walks of life trying to find jobs. I honestly think there’s a large swath of unemployable,” said Russo, whose firm manufactures and supplies analytical standards. “They don’t have any skills at all.”
The man seems to actually believe this. The story eventually points out, near the end, what kind of job he’s actually trying to fill.
This is well after all the stock lamentation about not enough people being sent to re-training camps community colleges and a number of piddly private sector efforts, like one by the Aspen Institute, to counter the lack of enthusiasm for the idea.
Anyway, Mr. Russo was trying to find someone who could run his high pressure liquid chromatography machines. DD ran high pressure liquid chromatography apparatus in laboratories for almost a decade.
As a grad student I taught laboratory courses which entailed training students in hplc. And I trained lab technicians how to do it when I was a postdoctoral researcher. One did not go to school to learn how to specifically run hplc. I went to get multiple degrees in chemistry.
It’s called building a foundation in a basic hard science. Handling equipment was a necessary part of it but not the essential or central part.
On paper, in standard news, hplc may sound like really high skill work. It’s not. People can be trained to do it and the outlay in labor and time isn’t particularly dear. And even if you are dealing with a person straight from some chem lab instruction at a vocational technical school or a community college, you will have to invest some time in training them on what you have.
My take on the matter, then, is that quite often the man in charge of hiring, or allegedly looking for skilled labor, is either too damn cheap or lazy or both to actually do what used to be considered the normal course of things.
That is, the not looking at people as machines fresh from a box, pre-programmed to operate as widgets for whatever you want done.
What you don’t see in these stories is who the people actually are that the human resources department is throwing out as unfit. Perhaps not all of them were but screening disposed of them, anyway. Or perhaps there were a couple of individuals who may have turned down a job offer or walked away because the company was just too irritating a place or diminishing in its returns. One is just delivered the implication that all job applicants are rubbish — which I strongly doubt is always the case in such matters.
The inefficiency then, as I see it, is not perhaps just in the labor force but also on the corporate side. Where it manifests as a profoundly selfish short-sightedness and disbelief and disinterest in entertaining the idea that people are very trainable. And that maybe it’s part of your civic responsibility to help in these matters.
Near the end of the Associated Press piece, all is revealed. The nature of the job is stated and the fact the Mr. Russo actually did eventually fill it.
“It took Ultra Scientific’s Russo more than half a year to fill one of those jobs,” reads the AP piece. “Until recently, he couldn’t find anyone to operate a specialized piece of equipment that performs high-pressure liquid chromatography, a technique that separates compounds in a solution.
“But his firm’s gain represents an economic loss to the state: The Ph.D. Russo is hiring is coming from [a company the closed its manufacturing facility in Rhode Island].”
In terms of just needing someone to run hplc, a Ph.D. is a bit of an over buy in terms of skills. So the man hired is probably making less than he formerly did.
While illustrates another aspect of hiring for “skills” jobs the AP piece does not mention.
Technicians for running hplc did not get paid particularly well back when I was working in labs although you can probably now find Ph.D’s, who earn a decent living doing only this at giant biotech and pharmaceutical firms. (If the work has not been outsourced to similar labs in Asia.) And these jobs are not good avenues to career advancement. But they are necessary busy work employment opportunities.
And that has not changed.
The first ever fundraiser continues, folks.
Chuck said,
July 2, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Yup. These folks want colleges and universities to be trade schools, instead of doing what they’re supposed to–teaching you how to learn.
When I came out of college, degree in hand, many years ago, I found that most of what I learned in college had little to do with what I was expected to know on a real job. Those first six-months-to-a-year on the job were the toughest studying that I’d ever done.
The good thing is that I’ve never stopped since.
Lorne Marr said,
July 3, 2011 at 12:11 pm
Sure, there are many new jobs requiring higher and higher skill levels such as network systems analysts or financial advisors but the fact is that these occupations only represent about 3% of all U.S. jobs. The occupations with the largest growth typically do not require more than a high school degree. A few weeks of on-the-job training is usually sufficient for these jobs.
George Smith said,
July 3, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Agreed. You can’t have a country where people seriously think financial advisors for the wealthy class constitutes innovation and growth.