I got about a third of the way through that malarkey before I decided the author knows not of what he speaks.
There IS a skill gap. Particularly in the skilled trades: plumbers, pipefitters, welders, electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, and on and on.
I know this from personal experience after having worked with construction contractors for decades. They complain that young people don’t want to get into the trades because they don’t want the manual labor; as a demographic, they would much prefer playing with technology all day.
Therefore, if I were a mature skilled tradesperson, I would sell myself to the highest bidder. Good ones ought to be able to pull $70k - $100k per year, and their market value seems destined to rise in the foreseeable future.
I agree with you in regard to skilled trades, and probably some other specialized areas that require a combination of education and experience that is in short supply.
I have seen the first point in action, and while I also empathize with the employer who says he can only afford to pay a certain amount for the job to be done, he also has options, one of which is to outsource the entire function to a low-cost country. Some will say he’s cheap, others say he’s offering what the job is worth - but either way it has nothing to do with skills.
The guy should have made his last point first, as this is the heart of the so-called “gap”. It’s less about skills and more about habits, and attitude. I’m not generalizing, but when you’ve grown up in a home where no one has ever held a job, your entire world-view is based around an entitlement culture, and you’re basically weighing the value of a job vs. the alternative of sitting around all day living on the public dole, there’s a skills gap, alright. But it’ll take more than job training to fix it.