Posted on 09/09/2011 8:05:07 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It's a mystery that begs for a solution: Unemployment is the No. 1 issue in America -- yet virtually all business people I talk to complain that they can't find the workers they want. When President Obama presents his jobs agenda to the nation this evening, listen carefully for him to address this issue. If he doesn't, he's missing a large element of our problem. (Update, 9/9: The President didn't talk about this phenomenon in his speech, nor does his proposed American Jobs Act address it. But we have to face it, because it's a large element of America's economic problem.)
The mystery begins to clear up after taking a close look at the state of U.S. workers, especially young workers, who have the highest unemployment rate of all; among those aged 16 to 19, it's 25%. The harsh reality is that even when jobs are available, many of these job applicants aren't ready for them. They aren't getting hired because they often aren't worth hiring.
Nobody wants to talk about this now because it sounds like blaming the victim. And it's important to say what is obvious, that unqualified workers are far from the only factor in our miserably high level of unemployment. But it's also important not to ignore this factor just because confronting it is painful.
An alarming view of prospective young employees comes from the Defense Department, which has found that 75% of Americans aged 17 to 24 are not qualified to serve in the armed forces. There are three main reasons.
First is inadequate education. About one-quarter of the cohort haven't graduated from high school, and about 30% of the high school graduates who take the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a test of basic reading and math skills, fail it.
Second is criminality.
(Excerpt) Read more at management.fortune.cnn.com ...
The problem I seem to find is my years of experience and past salary deter prospective employers from considering me. In a lot of cases, I know I fit the job description perfectly, but neither I nor the headhunters receive replies.
That is why OBAMA wants to redistribute my money....look at any large city.....best example New Orleans after Kitrina
Almost everyone I’ve interviewed for a programmer position couldn’t code themselves out of a paper bag.
That is why OBAMA wants to redistribute my money....look at any large city.....best example New Orleans after Katrina
As I’ve said before, the problem isn’t that not enough people have a chance to go to college. The problem is that not enough people are being given a quality education in elementary and high school.
Scary
When I took the ASVABs 20-odd years ago, they were pretty basic. I scored in the 95th plus percentile across the board and had recruiters beating down my door for awhile.
i do not believe that this is true. in fact, from personal experience, i think it’s about the money. with most jobs in the computer field paying 1/3 what they did 5-10 years ago it’s easy for the employer to say the worker does not have the credentials ... especially when they can outsource the position.
another fact ... the primo pharama company i just left is replacing all their US consultants with overseas consultants. and they are paying the offshore company the same rate/consultant that they were paying for US consultants.
In many cases these jobs posted on jobs boards are simply to meet the requirement before they can bring in a foreign family member under a work visa - they advertize, cannot find anyone and then bring in the foreign working usually a family member.
They cannot make jobs.
They cannot educate people.
They cannot manage a national economy.
If the government would just stand down, we would have smarter people, more jobs and a thriving economy. But noooooooooooooooo!
Don’t have to pay the offshore outfit Obamacare money. Obamacare makes it MORE attractive to offshore, not less.
Biggest prob that I see (well, I dunno, I see a lot of problems but I won't get started......) ...is that kids coming into the IT infrastructure don't understand *why* they're doing things. Or, how what they do will impact the business.
The latter comes with time. You only need to reboot the EMail server in the middle of the day ONCE to learn not to do it again.
The former? Not so much. They just look a problem up on Google and stick in whatever fix they find in whatever chatroom. "What does the fix do? Why will it work?" are questions I have to keep asking them. "I dunno, it just should." is the answer I get, more often than not.
The "Hows" and "Whys" are important. Always. And "Because it does" is rarely an acceptable answer, IMHO.
RE: In many cases these jobs posted on jobs boards are simply to meet the requirement before they can bring in a foreign family member under a work visa
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When my company was looking for software engineer consultants (contracting positions), it worked with various recruiting agencies. For some strange reason — every single potential consultant we interviewed were either from India, Pakistan or the Philippines ( all on H1B visas ).
After 8 interviews, we eventually hired a Pakistani on H1B.
I can’t help but ask aloud — WHERE THE HECK ARE AMERICANS?
When you get right down to it most employers are about 20 minutes from bankruptcy themselves.
Although it's always wise to focus on worker quality, it's meaningless to focus on that problem at this time.
Your fundamentals tell us that mechanization, automation, computerization, improved processes and robotics are destroying job opportunities worldwide ~ and this, in turn, is leading us down a path of massive deflation.
The machines are winning!
I call BS. Look if they can find Chinese workers to do the jobs, they can find Americans.
“It’s a mystery that begs for a solution: Unemployment is the No. 1 issue in America — yet virtually all business people I talk to complain that they can’t find the workers they want.”
That’s the excuse in San Antonio. It isn’t the lack of skill sets. It’s the freaking software that is weeding out potential candidates.
Example: A job description is written. On it are 10 things the incumbent must know. Those 10 things are now fed into a program which runs a query on the resumes and looks for key words. If it doesn’t find all 10, the resume is discarded. (Saved in the system for X is how the rejection letter looks)
So what is missing? Well, I prefer to look at someone who has a good chunk of the skills, worked for companies whose IT departments are progressive and where IT professionals get good experience. Also, what kind of person is the candidate. These are intangibles that a query engine cannot determine.
Are there qualified people out there? Of course. They are more qualified than the HR department that has a program do for them what they used to do themselves.
Blame it on IDEs (integrated develop environments) that hold your hand through the entire process.
Programming today is less about logic, and more about putting together pre-fabricated pieces.
Several times I’ve stumped someone byt asking them to write a code snippet, but I required them to use notepad as the editor.
LOL, I think the biggest cork in most corps is HR, certainly as bad as the cockroaches in legal. Ive yet to meet a more worthless do nothing bunch. In fact at times they seem to work against the depts they purport to sever. If you want to understand hiring problems begin w/ HR.
The other problem is we are pushing evryone to go to college. College is not right for everyone. We need more Tech school graduates. Companies are having a hard time finding people with hard skills. Tech schools go a long way in filling this gap.
I never went to college. I used my experience and knowledge that I gained from a 22 year career in the Marine Corps to get my foot in the door in the Defense industry.
In the 4 years since I retired from the Corps I have been laid off twice, but I was able to find a job just as good or better than the one I lost within 30 days.
There are good jobs out there if you have the skills industry is looking for. They are not looking for graduates with Liberal Arts degrees.
No kidding. And HR shops aren’t helping: I’m constantly getting pinged on jobs that I simply lack the expertise and/or experience to do. Yes, I’m a very senior IT pro, but, as in any senior professional, my expertise is concentrated in certain areas.
Combine that with the general level of illiteracy and semi-literacy out there, and it’s a nightmare.
Example: I had a head-hunter actually argue with me, saying I had claimed to be a JAVA programmer. You tell me: the line he quoted said:
“Systems Administrator on a test and production JAVA development environment”.
Another thought I was a qualified software tester based on the same line. . .
We DEFINITELY need better than the average HR droid out there. . .
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