Salient to Investors:

There are 4.7 million job openings in the US, the most in more than a decade versus 9.7 million people looking for work.

Annual wage increases, around 2%, would be rising much faster if there were a shortage of qualified workers.

Peter Cappelli at Wharton School says:

  • The problem may not be a lack of skills but employers’ expectations. In recent decades, on-the-job training has declined while companies want new hires to be able to hit the ground running.
  • In 1979, young workers averaged 2.5 weeks of training per year.  In 1991, only 17 percent of employees reporting that they received any formal training that year. In 1995,  between 42%-90% percent of employers offered training, averaging just under 11 hours a year.
  • In 2011, Accenture found that only 21% of employees had received any employer-provided formal training in the past 5 years.
  • Businesses now value experience above all else
  • Career and technical education (CTE) has declined in favor of traditional 4-yr colleges. The average number of CTE credits taken per student fell 50% from 2000 to 2005.
  • Businesses need to return to bearing more of the burden in training workers.
  • The fear of having a competitor reap the rewards of your investment are overblown.

Read the full article at  http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-19/its-not-a-skills-gap-u-dot-s-dot-workers-are-overqualified-undertrained#r=rss

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