Working in industry as a scientist, both as in a lab and as a manager, Ive seen this first hand. A lot of kids coming out of school that simply arent qualified. Aside from the usual blame game of its the schools fault, governments fault or industries fault. What I see happening, from a managers prospective, is a lot more job training programs and a lot more internships being offered by companies looking for talent. The brain drain is very real in industry, at LOL more than half of alll employees are within 10 years of retirement age. Top management is running scared that there wont be competent people to take over. Weve introduced new rotational programs to identify talented people and rotate them through different functional divisions to see where they fit the best. Not only that, but they pay for more schooling and training. Its a big budget expense! Thats how I got my masters, LOL paid for it. I hardly ever see initiatives like that being mentioned at all. Are efforts like these a market correction for a government failure to train kids to enter the workforce? It begs the question, what purpose does college serve for a lot of kids? So, even though our graduate schools may be producing highly qualified researchers, the research theyre prepared for is often only appropriate in an academic setting; commercial entities end up looking for a different set of skills. Industry also ends up looking for more people at early stages of their careers—the bachelors and masters levels—but only if they have a relevant skill set. For the most part, undergraduate educations dont provide those. The result of these is part of the imbalance that Dunn mentioned.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 15:54:22 +0000
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