There Are Far Too Few Skilled Workers For Some Jobs?
Really? 
by Susan Adams 
Forbes 
August 20, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/08/20/there-are-far-too-few-skilled-workers-for-some-jobs-really/

Is there a shortage of skills among American workers?
How can there be 12.8 million unemployed people in the
U.S. yet hundreds of thousands of jobs, particularly in
manufacturing are going unfilled? If you read widely in
the popular press, you will surely wonder.

A number of stories lately, including in the New York
Times, <see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/business/smallbusiness/even-with-high-unemployment-some-small-businesses-struggleto-fill-positions.html?_r=1>
and CNN Money, <see http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/08/smallbusiness/Indiana-manufacturing-jobs/index.htm>
have reported that there is a
yawning gap between the kinds of qualifications that
employers seek and the experience of available workers
applying for those jobs. The Times mentions a staffing
firm in Oklahoma City, Express Employment Professionals
where the CEO, Robert Funk, says he currently has
18,000 jobs he can't fill. In the CNN Money story,
Larry Davis, CEO of Daman Manifolds in Mishawaka, Ind.,
which makes parts for hydraulic valves, says he hasn't
been able to hire 10 workers who can operate Daman's
complex machinery.

Both the Times and CNN piece describe applicants who
simply don't get the kind of training they need to land
a job. Also, the CNN story quotes Kris Deckard,
executive director of Ready Indiana, a workforce
development project of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce,
who says some applicants are failing drug tests. Others
refuse to fill out lengthy application forms and still
others are nixed when they flub phone interviews.

But the notion that workers are really so wanting has
been called into question lately. Ryan Chittum, a
writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, has run four
stories that are critical of some of the coverage. 
<see: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/a_critical_eye_on_the_so-calle.php>
He complains that one of the sources in the Times story,
Drew Greenblatt, owner of a small manufacturing company
in Baltimore called Marlin Steel Wire, is an over-used
mouthpiece for the political agenda of the pro-business
National Association of Manufacturers, where Greenblatt
is an executive-committee member of the board, a fact
the Times fails to convey.

Also Chittum points out that there is such a huge pool
of applicants, hiring managers can both keep wages low
and be extremely choosey, frequently demanding
qualifications that are impossible to meet. Chittum
likes a Detroit Free Press piece suggesting the skills
shortage is a myth, and rather a product of employers
failing to offer any in-house training. <see:
http://www.freep.com/article/20120807/BUSINESS01/120807091/1002/NLETTER01/Shortage-of-skilled-workers-is-a-myth-say-auto-management-experts-in-Traverse-City?source=nletter-business>
The story quotes Dale Belman, professor of human 
resources and labor at Michigan State University, who 
says, "The perception of a skills gap is driven by 
reduced employer training and over-searching for the exact
fit." USA Today also recently ran a story underlining
how cuts in worker training programs have added to the
skills gap.

The USA Today piece quotes Peter Cappelli, a Wharton
School management professor and author of Why Good
People Can't Get Jobs, who describes how
training-averse companies want workers who can "hit the
ground running." The USA Today piece also describes a
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) study
showing that only 38% of companies say they cross-train
their workers to develop skills not directly related to
their jobs, down from 43% in 2011 and 55% in 2008.

Wharton's Cappelli is the main source for an excellent
one-page piece by The New Yorker's James Surowiecki on
the skills gap, that ran a little over a month ago and
laid out the subject in a way that brings the coverage
together. Employers are indeed complaining of a skills
gap, but they are letting the perfect be the enemy of
the good, as Surowiecki puts it. "Seeing an
overwhelming number of applicants makes them less
likely to pick one," he writes. Companies' inflated
bargaining power in this job market, with its glut of
available labor, has made it so employers can demand
qualifications that no single applicant can meet. "In
truth, companies increasingly want to hire only people
who already have jobs--ideally, as Cappelli observes,
people who have already done the exact job they're
applying for."

In addition, much of the screening is now done by
computers that toss out resumes that don't meet pre-set
criteria. Also Surowiecki underlines the training
issue-how in 1979, young workers received an average of
two and a half weeks of training, and now, according to
a recent Accenture survey, only 21% of employees had
received any training at all over the previous five
years.

The big picture that's affecting hiring is the
persistently weak economy, where companies must be
ever-vigilant about keeping costs down. That means they
are not in a rush to hire, so they raise job standards
and move slowly through the screening process. That in
turn perpetuates a cycle of high unemployment, weak
demand and, most importantly, reluctance to bring on
new workers.

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