The Skills Gap....A Corporate Fairy Tale

[Teamster Jeff]

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There is a durable belief that much of today’s unemployment is rooted in a skills gap, in which good jobs go unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. This is mostly a corporate fiction, based in part on self-interest and a misreading of government data.
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THE RESEARCH Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School, has noted sharply different opinions between corporate executives, who typically say that schools are failing to give workers the skills they need, and the people who actually do the hiring, who say the real obstacles are traditional ones like lack of on-the-job experience. In addition, when there are many more applicants than jobs, employers tend to impose overexacting criteria and then wait for the perfect match. They also offer tightfisted pay packages. What employers describe as talent shortages are often failures to agree on salary.

If a business really needed workers, it would pay up. That is not happening, which calls into question the existence of a skills gap as well as the urgency on the part of employers to fill their openings. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “recruiting intensity” — that is, business efforts to fill job openings — has been low in this recovery. Employers may be posting openings, but they are not trying all that hard to fill them, say, by increasing job ads or offering better pay packages.

Corporate executives have valuable perspectives on the economy, but they also have an interest in promoting the notion of a skills gap. They want schools and, by extension, the government to take on more of the costs of training workers that used to be covered by companies as part of on-the-job employee development. They also want more immigration, both low and high skilled, because immigrants may be willing to work for less than their American counterparts.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/dont-blame-the-work-force.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[SharonAnn]

1. But, of course. Though retired from IT, I've noticed that there many unemployed IT workers

and that salaries offered are low, though the demand for ever harder to reach skill sets are low.

Reminds me of the time when one of my clients, installing an OS-2 network in its early days, was looking for someone with 5 years experience in OS-2. Since it had been released for less than 2 years, that was going to be hard to fill. I pointed out to them that the only ones who might have 5 years experience (maybe) would be Microsoft or IBM employees and that they'd better up their salary offering significantly if they hoped to attract any of them. I told them they'd be better off looking for someone with the basics: network experience and proven flexibility in learning and working with varying IT technology.

There's not much, if any, skills gap. There's just a refusal to pay the appropriate salary.

[hay rick]

2. Exactly.

It isn't a skills gap- it's a pay gap.

[Sherman A1]

3. K&R

Thanks for posting!