Skills Shortage

The Time Magazine has a recent article on Skills Shortage written by a Wharton professor. The key take-away is that businesses are leaving vacancies open due to lack of interest in training employees, matching pay with market demands, and other reasons unrelated to candidates' actual lack of knowledge. I've considered this phenomenon at length. One example of lack of interest in training the article had was an opening for a cotton candy machine operator which demanded considerable experience in successful cotton candy machine operation. My personal favorite, from my own observations, was a Craigslist job ad from 2007 for an iPhone app developer with 5+ years of iPhone dev experience. Considering that the iPhone had been released for barely a few weeks, I presume that 5 years would be hard to come by even from the original iPhone engineers themselves. This brings me to the main subject: job training is a real problem these days. Businesses don't want to invest in training because the days of stable, long-term employment is long gone. Young employees move from job to job. Employers don't feel to responsibility to employees they used to when mass layoffs and restructuring are the norm.

The Steam Engine of the 2010s?

I read a couple of technology-/startup-oriented articles recently. One was yesterday's Forbes article on developeronomics which describes the growing prominence of talented software developers and investment in them in stark terms.