Employees Ready “Out of the Box” at What Cost?

[salvorhardin]

Great commentary.

There are a few narratives floating around in the atmosphere these days about labor, training, and credentials. There’s the one that says we have serious skills mismatch in our economy. The solution, this narrative says, is to quickly “retool” the “labor force” for specific job functions. The other narrative says that public colleges have failed to produce employable graduates. This narrative gives us the useless liberal arts refrain and touts STEM careers of the future while bemoaning the lack of math and science acumen of today’s worker. This narrative gives us the ever popular “there are tons of XYZ jobs and no Americans to fill them!”

...

Inherent in the aforementioned lines of argument is this fallacy: that there are enough jobs for people who want them and are qualified for them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

...

My first job out of undergrad was as a corporate trainer with a telecom company. Newly hired customer service agents were enrolled in a four week training program. I provided training on “soft” skills like how to handle irate customers to technical skills like navigating the proprietary mapping and billing software the company used. The idea that the company would find the tens of thousands customer service agents its business required who already possessed experience with a customized mapping software the company had commissioned was ludicrous. The expectation was that the company would have to train its labor force to do the specific job they needed doing.

Today, the neo-liberal narrative of “useless’ higher education and poorly trained American workers is an abscondment of a not so distant corporate commitment to invest in the human capital from which it profits.

Full post: http://tressiemc.com/2012/06/07/employees-ready-out-of-the-box-at-what-cost-2/