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Comment by ianb | Hacker News Reader

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 try-harder techniques (like increasing funding) won't result in the qualitative changes to make training a problem-fixer.

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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 of "training" of the sort that comes through years of hard work and experience, combined with an entitlement mentality that says "the world owes me a job" instead of "I will develop skills that are useful to an employer, and therefore be able to get a job".

As you say, this is not a problem that will be solved by increasing funding.

A corollary to this is that in any complex field that is expanding at any material rate, demand for capable (experienced) people will be higher than supply. There are more jobs than yesterday, so there are more jobs than there were people getting experience yesterday.

One issue I can see is that people can hone their skills on freelancing, open source and learning projects, but when they go for a job they will probably get beaten to the position by someone who better fills the 5 years of industry experience in x.... regardless of skill.

I really feel like apprenticeship could be useful in these cases. It's not like investment in employees, where if they jump ship you lost your investment - there's always the expectation that an apprentice leaves, it's a system built for informant operators.

But to be an apprentice requires more humility than most people are ready to offer - the basic equation is you get training and you pay for it by doing shitwork. Though I guess that's not too much different than an internship, except you work with a master (a person) not an institution (an employer).

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.

Now in order to be hired you have to know trivia questions.

Do people leave companies after a few short years because they're job hoppers? Or do companies drive them away with constant focus on profits, redundancies, cutbacks, and all these wonders of modern management? I'm more of the opinion that people 'jump ship' because they're worried that the rug is about to be pulled from under them at any moment by management.

I agree. I think people need to try harder to improve their situation. But that's easy for me to say because I'm employed. Maybe one creative (okay, not that creative) solution is for people who are employed to try harder to help those who are not so fortunate. If we have the training to keep income coming in and food on the table, certainly we have the ability to train others.

Although this will not generally directly benefit the trainer financially, it can help the overall situation of a community which benefits the trainer in the long-run. Plus there are the non-monetary benefits of helping someone less fortunate.

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