Employers are having an increasingly harder time finding young people for low-level and entry positions who are able to perform even the lowest skills and they are being forced to try and pre-train potential workers in the most menial skills.
One reason for this is the failure that is pandemic “remote learning” as students were released from schools without any real-world abilities past logging onto a computer.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country. It is one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.
Talent First, a business-led workforce-development organization in Grand Rapids, Mich., is encouraging employers to stop trying to hire based on skill. Instead, hiring managers should look for a willingness to learn, said President Kevin Stotts.
“Employers are saying, ‘We’re just trying to find some people who could fog the mirror,’ ” Stotts said.
The paper added that these skills have collapsed since 2019:
The pandemic, though, is not the only problem.
Employers have been finding young people lacking even the most basic skills for more than a decade and many large corporations have been forced to put young hires through classes in math, reading, English, writing, and a host of more job-specific courses before they can even start work.
The pandemic is not to blame.
Or horrible, useless, failed system of education from kindergarten to college is to blame.
The pandemic just ended up being the latest thing that revealed that failure.
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