Posted on 06/20/2011 4:46:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
One puzzle of this somber economy is the existence of unfilled jobs in the midst of mass unemployment. You might think (I did) that with almost 14 million Americans unemployed - and nearly half those for more than six months - that companies could fill almost any opening quickly. Not so. Somehow, there's a mismatch between idle workers and open jobs. Economists call this "structural unemployment."
Just how many jobs are affected is unclear; there are no definitive statistics. Economist Harry Holzer of Georgetown University thinks the unemployment rate might be closer to 8 percent than today's 9.1 percent if most of these jobs were filled. That implies up to 1.5 million more jobs. Economist Prakash Loungani of the International Monetary Fund estimates that 25 percent of unemployment is structural; that's more than 3 million jobs. A recent survey of 2,000 firms by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research group, found that 40 percent had positions open at least six months because they couldn't find suitable candidates.
Let's acknowledge two realities. First, though structural joblessness is important, the main cause of high unemployment remains the deep slump. In the recession, jobs dropped 20 percent in construction, 15 percent in manufacturing and 7 percent in retailing. Only a stronger economy can remedy this unemployment.
Second, a big economy like ours always has some vacancies. People quit or get fired. Hiring procedures grind slowly. Some highly specialized jobs are inherently hard to fill: say, a transportation engineer fluent in both Chinese and English (a real-life example).
Still, the job mismatch hobbles recovery and bodes ill. The harder it is for workers to find jobs, the longer they stay unemployed - and this, in turn, worsens their prospects. "Long-term unemployment sends a negative signal to employers: What's wrong with this person?" says Holzer.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
I think it's a direct result of the old adage "Adding people to a late software project makes it later." Rather than bringing in a candidate who is not a 100% match, the team just pulls more overtime rather than dealing with the distraction of training. And since just about every project is always late, they never fix the structural problem of having too few talented developers on staff - they rely on the two or three veteran "geniuses" to pull off everything on time.
Also, business intelligence is difficult to hire for, because HR gets caught up in matching capital letters they don't understand (C++, C#, SQL) when what is really needed is someone who can conceptualize business problems and their technical solutions. There just aren't that many of those people, which is why job postings these days are almost always asking for someone with dozens of capital letters and 3-5 years of experience rather than the 20 year veteran who very often turns out to be a career office politician with a limited ability to learn. Add in the looming expense of ObamaCare, and it becomes clear why your corporate career is essentially over at 40 if you haven't jumped onto the management track.
True that, I was trying to come up with valid examples. I’d say HTML coders, but I don’t think they are interested in the gory details of BI type stuff.
My husband retired 7 yrs ago from teaching electronics/computers at a community college. The first thing he had to do was retrain students in the math that they failed to learn in K-12. Most couldn’t even read a ruler. Only the foreign students were up on Math skills, and did the best in his classes. And all could speak excellent English.
A lot of jobs do not require a college education. Vo-Tech training would be a better choice for this batch of HS grads.
Keeping the serfs under educated makes them easier to control. Simple logic.
BINGO, especially if you are 50+.
IMHO HTML is more marketable on a resume for an applicant, but at the same time rather simpler to outsource.
BI is more app-specific and a bit more stable.
Both are important skills to have.
A college student who went to school fully on the government dime...won’t be hired by me.
An unemployed person who got all their job training compliments of their previous employer...won’t be hired by me.
The person who demonstrates they are willing to invest in themselves and their future...that is the person I want to sit down and talk too.
I’m a recruiter at a huge software company based in the Bay area. We have far more open reqs than we can fill. Almost every new person we hire is employed and we’re luring him/her away. If they’re unemployed, it’s because they just came off contract or just recently got laid off.
If anyone wants to ask me any questions or to dispel any myths, feel free to fire away.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2737109/posts
The news stories are out Journ-O-list style saying there are good jobs, but Americans are not trained enough for them. If only there were some Obama-type training program for Insta-Engineers! There would be no unemployment and everyone would have good paying jobs! Watch out people, Obama is trying to shove another ‘stimulus’ down our throats. And, since it will have the word, ‘education’ in the title, it is probably just another stupid program to refill bankrupt overpaid and overbenefitted teacher’s union retirement plans.
Just go to the petroleum sites all kinds of jobs...most overseas..
Our company has a policy in which we don't hire recent college grads and that means basically if you are less than 4 years out of school, don't bother. For every Jeff Zuckerberg you have 10,000 cubicle jockeys who simply want to get to 5pm and start their alcohol fueled rutting rituals. I think we are like that John Grisham novel The Firm now, you have to be married, stable and not wear a faux hawk or have multiple visible tatoos.
The company that my husband works for is looking for engineers, all kinds of engineers.
Part of the Obama education agenda, claims that it is racist to require a college degree for a job that could learned through on the job training because more White people go to college than Black or other minority.That was actually put into writing in the Seattle school district.
It isn't good enough to have sales/marketing experience in a similar field; they want someone who knows their products, has contacts in that industry.
The good news is the longer they take to fill these reqs, the longer I have a job.
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