51–60 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but speaking as a citizen of the USA, we spend the most with the least progress to show for it.
Properly, but only because for generations you had the money to throw at the problem - the US powerhouse used to be able to pay extra because it was the economy on the planet that was in the best shape.
This is another great opportunity to point out something rather puzzling about this recession. If you have a college degree your unemployment rate is 4.7%, with a big chunk of that 4.7% in the building related fields (architects, civil engineers, etc... are having a tough go right now). http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#monthly It's a double digit unemployment rate if you just have a high school diploma. Meanwhile ma…
This also means that highly skilled people become more in demand because they are the ones that are capable of designing and implementing these systems.
Unleashed unskilled labor in a low cost country such as China doesn't help the plight of the unskilled labor force in America/Canada either. Especially with the artificially low Chinese currency.
This is another great opportunity to point out something rather puzzling about this recession. If you have a college degree your unemployment rate is 4.7%, with a big chunk of that 4.7% in the building related fields (architects, civil engineers, etc... are having a tough go right now). http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#monthly It's a double digit unemployment rate if you just have a high school diploma. Meanwhile ma…
None of the hard-to-fill positions could be filled by someone with "training" - those are positions that require experience and talent. Both of those can be cultivated (I'm not so pessimistic to believe they can only be imported, or are formed by a population of fixed size), but training/education isn't going to do it. Which is maybe the fault of education, or maybe it's just that we ask too much of education. But tr…
Not that long ago, I read several quotes along these lines: "We have plenty of openings, and we're getting 5 times as many resumes as before, but only half as many qualified applicants." Most of the quotes were from people in medicine, IT, and similarly complex fields. The problem isn't a lack of "training" of the sort that could be covered by a community college course and a 3-month internship; the problem is a lack…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. I'm in my 30s and haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to continue learning. It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible. My Mom (nearly 60) went back to school last year to learn occupational therapy, and has been doing great. It's not rocket surgery by any stretch, but it's exactly the kind of retraining that's rele…
I had a guy in his late 70s in my accelerated Calculus II class this summer at a community college (power series, curve arc length, determining convergence/divergence, etc.) -- with a class full of students from second-tier schools. He was one of the few students to ace every test and exam.
If everyone is competing for the top 1%, you're never going to solve the problem. And of the people with the skills you want, why should they work at your crappy company instead of starting their own? Try this on for size: "Here, I'll give you a salary and maybe a tiny fraction of equity to come work at my company. But you're over 30 so you'll need to be re-educated." Why aren't you jumping at the chance!? Oh, maybe…
Only the top 1% of people (by creativity) are useful to creative companies. People in the bottom 99% reduce productivity. So yes, creative companies all need to compete for the top 1%.
Even if that top 1% gets bigger in absolute numbers, there will just be more or bigger companies vying for them, so the problem never goes away.
Even if you magically boost everyone drastically so the average person of the future is equivalent to the top person now, imagine how big an advantage the top 1% will still have.
A company that can't get top people is simply not competing well enough in terms of compensation of whatever sort.
An equivalent article could be written on the problems with employers and what they need to do to meet the requirements of the people they want to hire!
This article highlights something which I think will become a growing issue. Higher education is becoming prohibitively expensive for many young people, and often doesn't deliver (and isn't intended to deliver) the sort of training which employers seem to want. There's a need for better and more accessible vocational training, but at the same time a reluctance from government and employers to get involved with it - b…
I think one of the fundamental flaws with American companies is that someone with "the right skills" means the person is a shoe-in at the time of hire. They are expected the walk onto the job with all the training, know-how, experience etc that the company needs at that very minute. Since trends are constantly changing and always towards something new and never before seen, there will simply never be a time when ther…
That's not an American problem. It is a global problem.
100 years ago you got job training. Then you had to pay colleges the privilege filtering you or your colleagues out for the companies. Nowadays even that is not enough, and businesses are demanding 2-3 internships because people are desperate enough to push all the costs of job training onto themselves.
It is a welcome change for many businesses, but the result is that too many people choose a field by accident. Then they have effectively wasted X years and X dollars. As a business, you don't foot the bill of training a potentially bad worker/student, but the entire society loses total productivity.
None of the hard-to-fill positions could be filled by someone with "training" - those are positions that require experience and talent. Both of those can be cultivated (I'm not so pessimistic to believe they can only be imported, or are formed by a population of fixed size), but training/education isn't going to do it. Which is maybe the fault of education, or maybe it's just that we ask too much of education. But tr…
Back in the old days companies would hire smart/capable people and train them up. This mentality works well when you don't expect your workers to leave in under 5 years. I don't really know if this is a good or bad thing, but given the structure of American businesses it doesn't make as much sense to take on a new person, train them, then take the risk of them taking their skill set elsewhere.