Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:
MIT Sloan Management Review, March 29, 2021
by Nichola J. Lowe
Image courtesy of Stephanie Dalton Cowan/theispot.com
America has a skill problem. It’s not the result of inadequate educational systems letting down younger workers or a lack of aptitude among older workers, as some claim. The problem is the widespread failure of American companies to share responsibility for skill development. Many employers are simply unwilling — or unable — to invest sufficient resources, time, and energy into work-based learning and the creation of skill-rewarding career pathways that extend economic opportunity to workers on the lowest rungs of the labor market ladder.
This national skills crisis becomes clearest whenever unemployment rates are low. As late as February 2020, most industries in the U.S. showed persistent signs of skills shortages. In manufacturing, for instance, there were 522,000 unfilled job openings in late 2019. There were similar long-standing job vacancies in many other critical industries, including financial and business services, health care, and telecommunications, with executives noting increased skills gaps in data analytics, information technology, and web design, among other areas.
The skills shortage was less obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic, as companies shed millions of jobs, but it persists despite that temporary softening of the labor market. And as hiring picks up along with the economy, employers may increasingly develop workforce strategies that are based not only on skills requirements but on increased commitments to boosting diversity and inclusion.
A better and more enduring skills strategy must begin with the recognition that our national skills crisis rests on a deeply rooted but flawed assumption: namely, that skills are individually held. This view overlooks the collective and context-specific nature of skills — that is, the ways in which they are shared, reinforced, and reproduced through group interactions at work. It also creates a false justification for the bias and hoarding that often accompany employers’ approaches to talent management. That results in more educated workers benefiting from corporate investments in retention, leaving those workers with less formal education underserved and undervalued — a phenomenon that labor scholars call the “great training paradox.” Moreover, it leads to the mistaken categorization of entry-level workers as “unskilled.” This positions them as irrelevant and easy to replace, ignoring the fact that this segment of the workforce — so often women and people of color —not only executes strategy but also has the grounded insights needed to improve organizational processes and practices.
The core assumption that skill is individually held results in supply-side approaches that place the primary burden for skill development on educational institutions and on students within them. These approaches have not and cannot, in isolation, do the trick. Skill shortages are a problem of employment, not education...read the rest here
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