In my area, employers used to train their own workers. For example, JEFFBOAT, the large inland barge maker, used to conduct a welding school for now hires. When I hired in at TOWER Automotive in 2000, the company sent ALL its probationary workers to a 5-day, 40-hour MIG welding class at the local vocational school. If you couldn't pass the welding test at the end, well...you were probationary, and you could be let go right then and there.
Today, employers are looking for welders and other skilled workers who are ALREADY trained...and when they can't find enough qualified people, they want THE GOVERNMENT to train these people FOR them.
But they also want their taxes cut, after demanding THE GOVERNMENT pay to train their workers. So which do we do...cut government spending, which affects the funding available for education, so we can cut their taxes? Or do we spend the money to train these workers on the taxpayers' dime so there'll be a supply of already skilled workers?
Or maybe we could go back to the way it used to be, and let the employers pay for training their own workers. After all, that USED to work just fine; why won't it work NOW?
The thing is, right now NEITHER is paying to train these workers, because employers are cutting back their spending [except for executives] AND government is cutting back on spending. So then we have unemployed folks complaining that they can't get a job, and employers complaining that they can't find anyone who's already qualified. And I'm convinced that everyone agrees there's a problem, but NOBODY wants to pay the price to FIX THE PROBLEM...because they're all too busy trying to FIX THE BLAME instead.
Forty years ago, a local high school was involved in something they called Industrial Cooperative Education [ICE]. The ICE program partnered the school system and the businesses and the goal was to train the students in the skills the employers needed. These days, "cooperative" is apparently a bad word. No one cooperates with anyone, apparently because EVERYONE wants to be the "big cheese," and no one wants to cede even part of their authority for the greater good. So the schools and the businesses stopped cooperating, and then businesses complain that they can't find qualified employees. I don't know about YOU, but I can see a cause-and-effect relationship here.
And while schools fail to train students in the skills they need to get a decent job and employers wizz and moan about not having any qualified applicants, more and more products are made overseas by people who, somehow, ARE being trained to make things. In America, EVERYBODY wants trained workers...but nobody wants to pay the bill to train them. and THAT'S the core of the problem, as I see it.
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