The Retraining Paradox

When I interview for tech jobs the managers do a one to one comparison of my skills to the job requirements. When there are 2 or 3 requirements that I am missing they are disappointed. Yet the jobs are very specific and every company has different software and hardware. If I worked with HP equipment and they have Dell, they act like it's a problem. They see me as a fixed set of skills and incapable of learning. It is very difficult to get across that I like to learn and adapt to new environments. I enjoy the challenge and sense of accomplishment. When I explain this to them, they attribute this to puffery.

Just from the teaser (lede?) I can tell you that Paul Krugman has debunked this myth. If employers were having this problem, wages would be rising for those unfilled jobs. There is no evidence, per Krugman, of such a rise in wages!

WAIT - Hillary Clinton was proposing a well-funded retraining program specifically to help coal miners? THAT certainly didn't get much play in the "out of touch elitist" narrative where she was so caught up in "identity politics" that she "neglected" the needs of struggling blue-collar workers! Hmm - too bad we're just finding out now that she actually had a plan, huh?

Consider an overly simplified world in which six months of training is needed for a given job but the skills are obsolete after four years and the cycle begins again. Perhaps some combination of public, new equipment manufacturer, employer and individual funding could provide this retraining. Alternatively, similarly funded after work continuing education style training could fill this need.

Time for the Republican Congress to put up or shut up. It has worked in the Carolinas.

I teach adults who are looking for higher-paying and more satisfying work, in all kinds of industries and government agencies. The ones who are succeeding are already bright and inquisitive, and are determined to get to their goals. Unfortunately the students who decide to continue their education because they are just 'unhappy' or out of work are often very negative about life and are easily frustrated by the work required in the courses. Losing a job or being in one that depresses you is tough - and finding the mental strength to get out of that dark blue mindset is even harder. But future success depends greatly on optimism and self-confidence, and very few training programs can instill those qualities.

The conundrum of matching job seekers with available jobs sounds very much like the same issue that Match.com and other dating apps address, especially if you add the "qualifications" filters.

This piece is right on. I hire (or try to find) applicants for skilled positions being vacated by longtime employees, in addition to searching continually for talent in newer, tech positions that are being created faster than the supply of skilled labor can fill. Those of us in the HR fields see this all the time - sizable numbers of underemployed and unemployed workers but our open positions go unfilled for months at a time, sometimes longer, because of a qualified applicant deficit. The problem with government-funded skilled-jobs training is usually that it is chasing after a political objective rather than real-world demand. So-called green-jobs training is one great example of that - it's much easier for a politician to fund a training program for windmill manufacturing than gun manufacturing, even if demand for the latter is going unmet. They key, as the author here correctly observes, is to work with industry - even politically unpopular industry - to identify demand positions and then design training programs to serve that demand. And yes, employees should and will help fund these efforts. One additional note - even less-skilled jobs can be hard to fill because many applicants lack even the most basic skills for job searching and employment. That is where high school programs can help, and should, to prepare all students for even minimum wage, entry- level jobs. It starts there.

When I graduated from law school 35 years ago, there were no jobs. There was no "retraining." There was only downward socioeconomic mobility until I finally landed my first real law job 20 years after passing the bar.

Where do I apply for a tuition refund?

In the early 90s companies decided that the purpose of their business was to "maximize shareholder value". Not by coincidence the shareholders of companies happen to be the richest Americans and the top managers became large shareholders. The result has been a relentless march to the lowest possible benefit to workers. No expense is too small to cut in this pursuit. Training new employees? Too expensive.

Seems to me that a lot of the problem in the folks that Mr Trump was talking to is that they live in geographically undesirable areas for the kinds of jobs that are available. In order to ultimately solve the problem, we're going to have to bite the bullet and provide skills evaluation and relocation assistance to where the training and jobs are. It may well involve a subsidy effort with individual guidance and/or coaching to ensure success. It will help resolve the employment dilemma, but more importantly, it will provide these folks the ability to feel like productive members of society again.

companies have no loyalty to their employees anymore and don't want to invest in them.

the solution if they can't find a ride employees is to train internally but apparently that cost the bottom line

I find it ironic that we're encouraging students to major in the STEM fields or get certificates to work in a STEM field. All that's being said now is what I heard 40 years ago just as I was graduating from high school. As it happened I was interested in science. I wanted to be a physician. Failing that I wanted to work in cancer research. I majored in biology with a minor in chemistry. I was told that I'd be drowning in job offers. I graduated from college in 1980 and there were no job offers before or just after I graduated. It took me 9 months to get an entry level job in research. Eighteen years later I left the field.

The entire time I worked in the sciences, except for one employer, I received no training, no push to get an advanced degree, no credit for my contributions to the research (and yes, even research assistants contribute ideas, do the statistics, and set up the experiments), and was treated like a widget. One company, now well known, fired a bunch of us because of money problems, but never rehired us once it had the money back.

I retrained to work in IT. But even that's a problem because I now have more than 15 years experience in IT. The bottom line in America is that no one, not our government or the business sector has any interest in investing in us as employees. They expect us to train ourselves while they export jobs or bring in foreigners as they claim, falsely, that Americans can't do the jobs.

When was it that "we" decided to do away with vocational tracks in high school, determining that "everyone" needed to go to college? Such programs could be re-tooled to more accurately apply to the nowaday. Germany has been making such determinations with its students for years and years. Oh, and paying graduates of such programs decent wages.

I watched incredulously in New Jersey as the federal government paid big money to train inner city people, with no construction experience, how to install insulation and caulking to make existing houses more "energy efficient". (Program sounded nice.) It did not lead to real jobs. Selling people future savings from insulation upgrades is complicated. Every contractor I knew had several unemployed workers available with the skills to retrofit insulation and more.

Some of the comments below are disturbing. If there are private public partnerships as described in the article that benefit these graduates as well as the businesses, how is this bad? This does not sound like a scam. Who on earth would know that there is demand in the composite manufacturing? You would look at that job opening and discard it because you do not have the skills. This matches those that need a job with skills building. Its not that complicated a concept but needs an infrastructure to make it work because it won't happen on its own...businesses with very tight budgets can't afford to have such robust training programs.

Everyone has an opinion but few are willing to see for themselves what our neighbors and strangers in nearby towns are really facing. Get involved! Visit your area community colleges and talk with the students there. I teach at Great Bay CC. We have some of the most dedicated, caring people who want to see lives changed for the better. Come visit, see for yourselves. Then your comments will be more than mere words and sophistry.

Common sense tells us that not everyone is interested in and will be successful in computer-/technology-related jobs. Even China, the current economic powerhouse, has problems finding jobs for all her college graduates, even the ones with technical degrees. The fact is that no one has a practical and permanent solution to the unemployment and underemployment, especially of the underclass of the world. Why can’t people who want to work find jobs? Hungry people need food. Homeless people need shelter. Sick people need medicines. Roads and bridges need to be maintained and fixed when broken. Somehow, the free market economy does not consider these priorities, mainly because there is not enough profit to serve these markets. Profit motives drive the economy. Products and services only exist to serve those who can pay. But this can all change if we replace the profit directive with a universal lifetime labor employment mandate. If businesses exist to employ all people, then all the people’s physical needs can be taken care of and fulfilled, and the unemployment problem will be solved.

I'm a 51 year old who had a successful career in IT and suddenly found himself among the long term unemployed. I definitely think that retraining can help (and in the past I have invested in my own training heavily). But now I can't really identify what skills to invest in, and it's impractical for me to enroll in any program that lasts longer than 6 months. More importantly, it's hard for me to understand skills in demand locally.

Sadly, retraining ain't always enough, as I have discovered first hand. Usually, unless we're directing a computer driven robot, we also have to have the necessary manual dexterity, which not all of us have. For example, when I went to night school to try to learn how to weld, I found it much harder than I expected -- both gas and electric arc. I did make some progress but it was very slow. It was quite disheartening to discover that I just wasn't very good at it.

Likewise for many other crafts. I can work in many materials including wood, steel, aluminium alloys and plastics. I can build walls and fences, but I know that the work I do when I work at a reasonable pace is just not that great. If I slow right down, of course, then my quality improves somewhat.

As I think Winston Churchill said, most of us can lay bricks slowly and well, or lay bricks quickly and badly. It takes a skilled bricklayer to lay bricks quickly and well.

This article demonstrates how training targeted by a cooperative effort of government and industry can be one key in helping people become employable. It's never a perfect process. If a bomb hits it's target 25% of the time we call it a 'smart' bomb, but a training program with an 50% success is often seen as a failure. And yet, it remains the most cost effective way of preparing people for jobs of the future - retraining all the layer off coal workers for 2 years would probably cost less than a week or two of war.

Please do more stories like this. People who are hurting are attracted to Trump because they feel neglected.

This is rich. The private sector outsources training to meet its needs to the government and passes the cost to us taxpayers.

There is no disconnect. If you pay them appropriately for area cost of living and educational investment they will come. Some small employers might struggle but everyone else is just complaining because they can't get their workforce cheap enough.

Those of us in the labor force for at least 40 years don't find this problem all that hard to understand. That's because we can still remember the days when employers -- not taxpayers or jobseekers -- footed the bill for the training of their own workers. We can remember when an entry-level job might just be enough to support a small family and not the measly $16 an hour paid to one of the trainees cited in your story. We can remember when really good performance might get you a double-digit annual raise or a meaningful promotion and not the 1-2% -- or nothing -- offered today. We can remember when the duties of three people were not crammed into a single job. We can remember when it was rare to be contacted by your employer on weekends or evenings, unless there was a crisis. We can remember when employers paid a fair share of their workers' health insurance. We can remember when senior managements were more focused on their customers and workers than on dazzling (or bamboozling) Wall Street analysts. We can remember when our CEOs were well-off, but didn't need to pull down $20 million a year or more while the people who gave them that prosperity were barely squeaking by. And we can remember when companies treated their employees as valuable assets and not as garbage.

If you peel back the layers of these unfilled jobs, you'll find that many of them aren't as attractive as the employers make them out to be. It just takes a little historical perspective.

The basic problem is companies are unwilling to train people for their specific jobs, then don't pay enough so the workers who are trained don't leave for better offers. They don't factor in the cost of a replacement worker when deciding how cheaply they can retain a current worker.

Giving people raises on a regular basis goes a long way toward employee retention, but how many times do you see people working for just above minimum wage?

Texas gives signing bonus for badly needed B.S./R.N. nurses in cities where they need ICU/Critical care nurses, etc. Many jobs (especially in healthcare) need advanced degrees. When we have immigrants, illegals, and uneducated Americans, expect the problem to persist in many fields.

I've had a few American manufacturers as clients. I am not saying this is the truth, but this is the evil management's perspective.

-There is a belief that there are fake disability claims. Low paying jobs don't pay much more than some disability payouts.

-No one wants any hard labor jobs. It's very hard to fill jobs working in a kiln even if pay is high for blue collar jobs. Everyone wants to work in an air conditioned facility where you just press a button over and over all day.

-People aren't qualified for the more technical manufacturing jobs that are more than repetitive elbow grease and require technical skills. In the US, it's cool to hate math.

Organizations today do not simply want intelligent, hard-working employees with broad academic and professional experience in the area in which they will be employed, they are expecting to find individuals with years of experience in highly specialized areas. Today, it is not atypical for organizations hold positions open for a year or more, rather than hire and train someone to perform the role. That forces employees to use their own time and resources to advance their skill level, often by taking time out of the workforce to earn additional degrees or professional credentials. Lost wages and expenses make that a costly proposition, but could be worth while if organizations compensated workers for those hard to obtain skills. What is so problematic, is that organizations want to pay these highly specialized employees on the same scale as their more generic counterparts from years ago. That is the equivalent of asking for a limited edition, handmade Swiss watch, but demanding to pay the cost of a Casio digital watch because both are watches.

Excellent article, but one question: are there now ZERO examples of companies that provide on the job training?

It seems like the fastest, easiest way to get workers to believe in the promise of retraining is to hire them up front and invest in their development, not to ask them to undertake 6-24 months of retraining just for the promise of an interview.

Companies can probably write off in-house training expenses just like they already do with their contributions to these complicated partnerships with local community colleges, so why is on the job training completely off the table?

What was so bad about an apprenticeship model where the trainees actually get paid to learn new skills?

Newsflash! Excessive Immigration does reduce the number of lower class jobs for natives and rate of pay. People in the lower echelons struggle to compete when there is an exodus of manufacturing jobs among others. Real scientific studies have shown it over and over again.

Employers can't fill jobs because they don't want to pay correctly. I've been shocked lately at how low companies want to pay for a job that is really three different fields.

Could someone please tell high schools what they need to be doing to prepare their non-college bound students for some of these job openings? Do principals need to be out beating the bushes to make alliances with individual companies? We have so-called "career centers" which are supposed to be preparing high school kids for jobs, but some of the career centers don't seem to be doing anything. High schools need help and guidance, especially smaller high schools. We need to re-build vocational training within the high school curriculum. What are the classes high schools should be offering? Help!!

Has anybody done a comparison of what high-level managers say about obtaining skilled workers versus what line-level managers say? I think there would be some real surprises in that comparison -- and a lot of potential for insight.

Trump promises his followers that he will get their old jobs back where they live. Note how different that is from retraining and adapting to a new reality of manufacturing jobs involving new skills.

Kerri U "had conflicts with her supervisors and lasted just over a year in the job [...] her house went into foreclosure. Kerri U also calls the experience “one of the biggest heartbreaks I’ve ever gone through.” Can Kerri or the author be more specific about what happened please?

There is some screwy logic in this article. Companies don't want to train workers because they are worried that competitors will make a better offer? Don't we call that the free market? And shouldnt' we let market forces put companies back into the mindset that they are investing for the long term when they hire and train employees? Why do we expect the worker to take on debt or the tax payer to subsidize the company? "But the rules have changed--employers and employees have to be "flexible." That kind of reasoning is just special pleading: any company at any time period would love to be involved in such a scheme.

I see people doing jobs all the time that I can imagine need a different kind of education background than standard college. Who maintains all the digital-electro-mechanical devices that can surround a hospital bed, for instance? We live in a very materially complex society. I imagine high school and community college programs where math, English and problem-solving are taught in real-life contexts (not necessarily in students' exact target fields but in representative but real contexts.) Word problems can be illustrated and animated on computers, but math and English tasks (write an e-mail describing a technical problem) could also be worked out at a community college shop table. This type of education might indeed fit more closely to ways people actually teach and learn, and as such would be more effective than academic learning aimed at technical skill. The question is: is society willing to support education that will train people to hold many different practical jobs throughout their work lives?

I suppose I'm being churlish if I suggest that if he'd majored in Computer Engineering instead of Communications he'd have been pulling down a good salary starting with the day after he graduated. but that would have required a lot more effort for those four years.

Yes it does sound like the government funded/industry coordinated retraining programs you describe have had some limited success.

But in the Great Bay program you describe only half of the 170 trained got jobs. This program has wasted the time and money of 85 people. 85 people who are now worse off, more deeply in debt,still unemployed and with skills no one wants. How is that a success?

In my experience most of jobs created by retraining programs are for the people doing the "retraining" alone. Employers, if any, then cherry pick from the people subjected to these programs and hire few. Further once hired, the newly employed are subject to being fired at will when dim-witted managers run their firms into the ground.

What state and federal governments could do to help the unemployed is actually enforce existing labor and job discrimination laws against these greedy and lazy employers. Maybe even strengthen existing regulations. Get rid of the H1B program all together for example. Bring the hammer down on employers who discriminate against even highly qualified older workers, disabled workers and other excluded minority populations.

But this isn't going to happen, is it?

I applaud this retraining program in composites for producing skilled labor for high value added manufacturing. This is the kind of well-considering training, closely aligned with industry, that our country needs. It sounds a little like what they do in Germany.

I also applaud the students engaged in this, trying to change and do better. Mr. Dean Kandilakis, a well educated man, would seem to have insight into the stress of changing his identity. Perhaps the students could use psychological support as well.

These people should be rewarded with a good new life.

The free market is cruel. Nobody's job is safe. I know plenty of Ph.D.s in STEM subjects who are begging for jobs as high school teachers. Training does not protect you from the law of supply and demand, nor does it protect your from new technologies that allow low-skilled workers to do your job. Your employer may be happy with the job you are doing, but he his not happy to pay you. The CEO of a major company (I forget whom), said the ideal employee is a temp, someone you can hire for ten minutes and then fire. Obviously he was exaggerating to make a point, but it is a scary point. Blue collar workers who are suffering from modernity should take a bit of comfort knowing they are not alone.

You have to admit, looking at a screen all the time is depressing.

Other states have had the same problem with steel mill workers They were trained in medical technology,but did not feel it manly enough.

This sounds like public money financing private industries who refuse to train their workers. If there is a need for workers, and they can't wait two years, and are receiving $580 million contracts from the Army, something is wrong with that.

How many people can afford or are able to even take 6 months of training without pay? I'm currently in trade school, doing night classes 3 nights a week and I don't see how many people I know could realistically do it and pass. I'm lucky to have a steady 9-5 and time to study on my 4 free nights.

To me, the fact that The Great Bay is unable to lean on these companies in way that benefits workers, and instead is feeding them tons of public money is the more pressing political problem.

It is heartening to see a greater emphasis on actual demand in newer retraining programs. Far too many of these programs have been little better than scams, training people for jobs that didn't exist -- as the article pointed out, giving them skills that were just as obsolete as their old ones. Demand-driven training is a start, although there are a few caveats:
1. The actual job placement of graduates must be monitored annually, because eventually every field will reach saturation point where there is a glut of qualified applicants.
2. Applied technology skills training must be paired with job readiness training that prepares the applicant mentally for the work world -- things like the social skills to interact with coworkers and resolve conflicts successfully, some measure of intercultural competence, work ethic, and realistic expectations. As Ms. Uyeno's experience illustrates, if an employee lacks these skills, they are unlikely to be successful even if they have excellent practical skills.
3. The other part of the employment problem is the need for assistance in relocation. A program to feed employers in a booming area of New Hampshire does nothing for unemployed workers in Flint, MI or Wheeling, WV. If you are stuck with a house that is underwater, relocation isn't an option. There needs to be some program that will financially support relocating to an area with greater opportunities or many will remain left out.

The problem, often, is not that industry cannot find well trained workers for their new high tech jobs. The problem is that industry is unwilling to pay workers enough to make it worth their while to take the jobs offered at the wage offered.
The other problem is that industry is simply too inept at analysis in the area of what constitutes qualifications for a particular job. The hiring side often simply does not want to do the hard work of thinking but simply says, "Okay, for this job you need a Masters in international relations" or a PhD in nursing, without actually looking at what those degrees mean or at what the job really requires. Stupid in. Stupid out.