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 there is a bounty-full supply of shoe-in candidates.
American companies need to look for people who are fundamentally smart, able and willing to learn, are problem solvers and have reasoning skills and whom they can shape into the exact resource they need...and then know they can reshape them again when needed. I really believe this will lead to a far more qualified workforce at every company and be a source of renewed loyalty between employers and employees.
Consumerism has driven America into treating labor as any other store bought product which can be easily, quickly and cheaply acquired to fill a momentary need and discarded when trends change.
This is not a labor market problem, it's a problem of approach and mentality in staffing and HR.
Look at the really successful companies out there and you'll see they hire fundamentally smart people, everything else can be learned.
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.
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.
Clarification (since I can't edit my comment anymore):
Businesses should foot the cost of job training to prevent supply/demand mismatches where thousands of people spend 4+ years preparing for a job they never get hired for.
Why? A business is much more in tune with market demand than students following the flavor of the year and end up being edged out by 0.1 GPA or being the 101th person in a market that can only sustain 50 new workers a year etc...
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.
I don't think that it's a uniquely American problem. It's just like that in IT in London, UK.
It's endemic in a lot of companies in the UK - I keep having arguments with non-technical managers about their insistence that people have to "hit the ground running" with a very narrowly defined set of skills (which usually turn out to be wrong).
The same people who take this approach to hiring then complain when developers get stroppy about only working on specific skills that will get them their next, better-paid, job.
"...it's a problem of approach and mentality in staffing and HR"
This seems to go deeper than that - in economics class, they teach that labor is always an easily variable input, that can be changed more or less instantly. Especially after reading about the effect of all "A" people in a company, it seems to me that economics is still stuck in the thought of labor as factory workers or the like - not modern thought workers. You can see how this thinking could influence company hiring practices.
On another note;
Maybe the real shortage we have is of people "who are fundamentally smart, able and willing to learn, are problem solvers and have reasoning skills"? I don't think so personally, but it's possible.
Since trends are constantly changing and always towards something new and never before seen, there will simply never be a time when there is a bounty-full supply of shoe-in candidates.
American companies need to look for people who are fundamentally smart, able and willing to learn, are problem solvers and have reasoning skills and whom they can shape into the exact resource they need...and then know they can reshape them again when needed. I really believe this will lead to a far more qualified workforce at every company and be a source of renewed loyalty between employers and employees.
Consumerism has driven America into treating labor as any other store bought product which can be easily, quickly and cheaply acquired to fill a momentary need and discarded when trends change.
This is not a labor market problem, it's a problem of approach and mentality in staffing and HR.
Look at the really successful companies out there and you'll see they hire fundamentally smart people, everything else can be learned.