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There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

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Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#31

Post by caseysoftware »

goodcanadian wrote: post #16
_cbsz wrote: post #3

I feel like I've seen a lot of articles about people who can't find jobs or who are worried about their increasingly-outdated jobs going away in the short term. This article says we also have a lot of jobs that can't find people. What's the missing piece? Re-training? What does that actually look like for a 30- or 40-year-old person who has a family to support and doesn't much care for government handouts?

It's speculation, but my take would be that there are two missing pieces: 1) Inadequate pay. 2) Unwillingness to train. If you don't have the exact skills that the company wants, they won't hire you. But they will complain that they can't find anyone even though they are really only offering unskilled level wages.

And location.

If you're 30/40, odds are you have a family, roots somewhere, and maybe a mortgage. Your ability/willingness to move - especially after being out of work for a while - is near zero.

* I'm late 30s with all of the above.

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#32

Post by greglindahl »

twoquestions wrote: post #14

As someone else has already said, the biggest shortage is skilled labor, not unskilled. Trouble is, it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate, and it's unwise to train someone when they could get poached by the next company not willing to shell out for training. I also wonder how sticky their wages are. If a business can endure not filling a position unt…

In most parts of the US, community colleges already work with local businesses to offer the right courses for workers to acquire skills relevant to local unfilled positions. Here's an example program from the area I grew up in:

http://www.gvltec.edu/cnc/

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#33

Post by stuckagain »

_cbsz wrote: post #3

I feel like I've seen a lot of articles about people who can't find jobs or who are worried about their increasingly-outdated jobs going away in the short term. This article says we also have a lot of jobs that can't find people. What's the missing piece? Re-training? What does that actually look like for a 30- or 40-year-old person who has a family to support and doesn't much care for government handouts?

There is no missing piece, because the first part of your statement isn't backed by fact. There's not a big dark pool of people who can't find jobs. The second part of your first sentence is maybe true, but maybe not. In surveys of Americans most people feel positive about their economic circumstances, at every level of income. 75-80% of Americans report they feel their job is secure[1].

1: http://kff.org/report-section/kaiser-family-foundationcnn-wo...

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#34

Post by TeMPOraL »

goodcanadian wrote: post #16
_cbsz wrote: post #3

I feel like I've seen a lot of articles about people who can't find jobs or who are worried about their increasingly-outdated jobs going away in the short term. This article says we also have a lot of jobs that can't find people. What's the missing piece? Re-training? What does that actually look like for a 30- or 40-year-old person who has a family to support and doesn't much care for government handouts?

It's speculation, but my take would be that there are two missing pieces: 1) Inadequate pay. 2) Unwillingness to train. If you don't have the exact skills that the company wants, they won't hire you. But they will complain that they can't find anyone even though they are really only offering unskilled level wages.

1) is also connected to 2) - you can't effectively train yourself in a new field if you spend 8 (more likely 10-12) hours / day earning money just to feed yourself and your family.

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#35

Post by toomuchtodo »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #30
twoquestions wrote: post #14

As someone else has already said, the biggest shortage is skilled labor, not unskilled. Trouble is, it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate, and it's unwise to train someone when they could get poached by the next company not willing to shell out for training. I also wonder how sticky their wages are. If a business can endure not filling a position unt…

Case in point: my employer has a vacancy that has been unfilled for the better part of a year now because they want to hire a full-time Database Administrator and not pay more than $65k. My theory is that they're intentionally low-balling it so that no one will apply and they can hire an H1B.

Job vacancies below market rate should not be counted as openings. Pretty easy to determine market rate from data provided by payroll providers (ie ADP).

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#36

Post by ared38 »

cle wrote: post #27
twoquestions wrote: post #14

As someone else has already said, the biggest shortage is skilled labor, not unskilled. Trouble is, it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate, and it's unwise to train someone when they could get poached by the next company not willing to shell out for training. I also wonder how sticky their wages are. If a business can endure not filling a position unt…

The core problem here is that we can't adapt quickly enough to change. To ensure we can adapt quickly enough, we can either slow down change and make progress more difficult (which seems to be the popular sentiment), or we can make adaptation easier and faster. When framed like that, IMO it's obvious--we need to focus on adaptability, not conservatism. We are ineluctably bound by the laws of survival and natural sele…

But how? If it takes 4 months to train on a new CNC machine or 8 to learn the latest web design tools, how do we make people more adaptable?

There are certainly some jobs that are currently over trained, as evidenced by nurse practitioners taking over some common general practitioner roles. But I'm not convinced that's the situation in manufacturing.

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#38

Post by toomuchtodo »

sien wrote: post #37

This is a bit weird. US unemployment is at 4.6% http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 US growth is about 2% http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locati... That's really pretty good. Most developed countries would be happy with that.

2% growth is very low. Jobs =! well paying secure jobs.

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#39

Post by fullshark »

moxious wrote: post #24
michael_h wrote: post #6

I'm always baffled by the people in these articles. From the anecdote at the beginning: he's having trouble hiring people for $12/hour (up to $70K/year with bonuses, etc). I am also having trouble hiring people: I need a senior software engineer. Pay is $12/hour. It's taking me a long time to find workers. I guess people are just lazy and don't want to work.

Yeah, the journos who are writing big articles about big trends always seem to want to anchor them with anecdata from the 2 local guys they talked to, as if that actually sheds light on the situation. Usually it just confirms whatever narrative their story is pushing. I don't know what's a fair price in every area of the country for all of these jobs, so beats me if $12 is good or bad, but beyond this one anecdote, p…

People relate much more to anecdotal examples than statistics. A good journalist for these types of stories has hard data underlying their premise and usually a good in-person interview or two to put a human face on it.

Re: There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America

#40

Post by insickness »

pc2g4d wrote: post #28

The mismatch between available jobs and the skillsets of the workforce has baffled me. Is it just that autoglass installers aren't in sufficient demand for people to train to become autoglass installers? And so would it be economically inefficient for the government to subsidize the education of more autoglass workers? But maybe it's not a question of insufficient demand for these skills. Maybe it's a question of mat…

The problem with this is that its often difficult to tell whether a person is suited for a job or even would like a job until the person starts training in it. You could decide you want to go into HVAC because there's a lot of money in it. But six weeks into the training you hate it or you realize you suck at it. Who foots the bill for that failure?
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