July 08, 2012
The Washington Post ran perhaps the best ever in-your-face article to the pundits who talk about the skills gap. Just to remind people, the skills gap story is that there all sorts of jobs that are going unfilled because employers just can’t find people with the necessary skills. In this story, the problem with the economy is not a lack of demand, the problem is that unemployed workers just don’t have the skills for the jobs that are available.
This one gets repeated endlessly in spite of the fact that there is no evidence for the story. There are no major sectors of the economy with large numbers of job openings relative to the number of unemployed workers, lengthening workweeks as firms seek to get more hours out of their existing workforce, or rapidly rising wages as firms try to bid away workers from other firms.
Lack of evidence never embarrassed a Washington pundit, but perhaps a compelling story will. A front page article in the Sunday Post reported that PhDs in chemistry and biology are having trouble getting jobs in their field. It reports that many are taking much lower paid positions outside of their field. Perhaps our pundits have a training program that will give these people the skills they need in today’s economy.
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