Concerning skills shortages

The EU has set education as an exceptionally high priority. Youth unemployment, particularly in Southern Europe has reached pandemic proportions. It is growing elsewhere. Industry and politics are crying for highly trained, qualified candidates to fill much-needed high-skilled jobs. We're in the midst of a crisis. The problem is, it's not the crisis that politics and industry are wringing their hands about.

You hear similar tones in much of the American political debate, if they can ever get away from defense, healthcare, or gun ownership. Everybody's got their priorities, even if they're all screwed up. Still, we have to ask ourselves what is this crisis all about -- really? If industry's not hiring, it is easy to say they'd love to if they could only find the right people for the job, and politics, believing them, runs off and starts pushing vocational education and training (VET) or higher education, or whoever it is that they think they can push around to solve the problem. The problem is, if there's a problem, it's not that problem, it is another one, and it's a much bigger one, too.

At a recent conference in Brussels, in regard to this crisis only in the IT sector, industry made the case that there were five reasons why they couldn't find qualified personnel. Among the usual suspects of low levels of practical and job-related skills, interpersonal competences and the like, there was #5, which stood out like a sore thumb: unrealistic compensation expectations. Yes, you have to let that roll across the tongue. I'm dying for help, you could help, but you want to be paid too much to do it. That's the nice way to put it. I once learned there was such a thing as supply-and-demand: when supply decreases, demand increases, prices rise. Apparently that does apply in real economies. The solution? Hire Far- and Southern Eastern help at a fraction of the cost. Bingo! Immigration reform is a sudden priority.

If that's not bad enough, it gets worse: even though the so-called "law" of supply-and-demand has been somehow nullified, because even if the domestic candidate is willing to be underpaid for what s/he is going to do, it still isn't low enough to compete. These worthless hand-out-wanters apparently don't know a good deal when they see one. They will have trouble making ends meet on what they earn, they will most likely have to seek some kind of government assistance to help them keep their heads above water, but we've got an unsolvable skills-shortage problem. And industry keeps beating up politics to get them to do something about it. The problem is, the only thing politics can do is flail around, but it's a good distraction from the real machinations of industry which is purely and simply more profit.

No the real problem is not a skills shortage, it's a profit shortage.

But, it gets worse ... more next time.