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Comment by sixtofour | Hacker News Reader

> "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this?

That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart. No business should expected to take on people unskilled for a job. Some businesses will do so, to grow talent, and some of those will show an ROI, but no business should be expected to do so.

Given that, people do need to suck it up and learn new skills. The article made a good argument for that, and did it in the context of the new reality.

Some people won't be able to develop new needed skills, for various reasons. For some people technology and society will just move faster than they can keep up with. Others have some other impediment. As this trend continues, we need to get better as a society at dealing with those people.

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The idea that business shouldn't be expected to train its workforce is intriguing to me. This seems to be an underlying assumption in our society, but I don't recall ever having heard an argument for it one way or the other. Isn't a business that refuses to provide any of the necessary education for its employees profiting from a well-educated society without pitching in anything for the bill? If all governments worldwide were to refuse to invest in education in any way, the rational business decision would be to take this on themselves, or risk having no workforce with which to remain competitive. From this point of view, our enormous societal investment in education looks a lot like a subsidy.

Businesses pay taxes and spark huge amounts of taxable activity in the course of operating — that's how they pitch in (even discounting the non-tax benefits that businesses provide to society). If society is not providing education with those tax dollars, that would be society's choice.

I can see some reasons why businesses might want to provide education (and many do in certain circumstances), but in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's.

"... in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's."

If a business wants to be successful they should invest in employee training IMO. I'm one of these recent college grads with "no marketable skills".

The company I'm with needs iOS developers. They could conceivably try to find qualified people, but that would be time-consuming, expensive and far from guaranteed that they'd find anyone (as there is little iOS developers where I live). Instead, by allowing me to teach myself to build apps, they have someone who will hopefully be making them money in a few weeks/months at a fraction of the price of an experienced developer (if they could find one). This point ties back into the article's observation that people are graduating with unneeded/bullshit degrees.

I would be interested to see some quantification of the total cost to educate a company's work force, compared with its tax burden (and the "taxable activity" it sparks, if that is quantifiable in some way), for a number of different types of companies. Has anyone seen data like this? Doing some napkin-style calculations it seems like I could convince myself of either conclusion.

The 'business lobby' is almost 100% against providing education, which is a significant part of the reason that neither the public nor private sector is doing an adequate job.

Business and society don't operate apart from each other.

People can leave their jobs at-will, which makes it is lower-risk to employ people your competitors trained than to train them yourself.

But it is higher-risk to be unable to find anyone employable than it is to train people yourself. So the system depends on a surplus of already-trained workers, which someone needs to provide, or everyone suffers.

Well then businesses could just start offering contracted jobs with fixed lengths rather than "at-will employment" (aka: "leave/be fired for the lulz employment").

>That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart.

I bet they and the lady at Rite-Aid regularly read Forbes magazine, right? Don't kid yourself--this article is meant for the echo-chamber. And that's why I think it's a waste of space.

The discussion can be started anywhere. Most helpful when it eventually (if it hasn't already) trickles down to the non-Forbes reading masses. If nothing else the article seeds a talking point for Forbes readers.

Yes, I believe three things have to be true:

1) We have to be clear that to be employed you need new skills (trades or science or engineering)

2) We have to find a way to encourage both the creation of skills training programs and a way to enable folks to take advantage of them.

3) We should start providing resources so that kids in school today understand that we're not 'forcing' them to go to school, they should go to school so that they can find gainful employment later (or entry into a tradeskill program).

Serious business.

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