The case of Spain

Spain has a 20% unemployment rate. There are also 2 million job openings. Why can't those unemployed people take those open jobs? Lack of skills.

Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed - Bloomberg

 

Maybe Spain can look in to how UK is dealing with qualifications that teach skills.
Apprenticeships etc.
Many training and education provides in UK teach skills and qualifications on different levels in order to provide the market with skilled professionals.

Edexel, City and Guilds accredit learning centers that teach white range of skills. from Hairdresser, hotel industry, food industry, Engineering, and many many more.

Vocational training, qualifications, apprenticeships | City & Guilds

Apprenticeships | City & Guilds


Apprenticeships are training programmes that can be used for new and existing employees from age 16, which are undertaken in the workplace and combined with off-the-job learning.

Apprenticeships in the UK are currently undergoing Government reforms, which include the introduction of Trailblazers (newly developed Apprenticeship Standards that will eventually replace the existing SASE Frameworks).

 

Strong qualification frameworks are designed to address these issues proactively instead of leaving them to very inefficient markets.

The people who get hurt in these mis-matched situations are the workers. Employers are doing just fine, even though they'd rather have more skilled workers. If they were desperate, however, they'd take matters into their own hands and train workers themselves. Instead, the government needs to step in and provide frameworks for workers to get skilled in in-demand fields.

 

This is true.

 

No, it isn't "the opposite." Macroeconomics has always included government oversight and regulation. In fact, it has a very strong role in making markets act fairly when imbalances occur. Some of the worst ills in our society have been a result of unregulated, rampant capitalism.

Also, I'm not sure I even understand your statement, because I called markets "inefficient," not "free" or "not free."

I was surprised at how much economics was a factor in Leicester's DSocSci program. It was pretty huge. Consider reading Robert Wade's Governing the Market for a very interesting perspective on how both government and capitalism can interact to create positive outcomes.

 

Employers train les and less.
They prefer to import cheap labor on work visas.
Or move operations to cheap labor zone.
Cooperations have strong and influential lobbying forces with governments.

 

Ironic, it is, that we are having a discussion of the merits of statism and government control vs liberty and free markets as we celebrate Independence Day.

 

Regulation is a two edged sword.

It can keep salaries, professionalism and safety high as in the case of medical licensing. Many barriers to entry keep people like me from going out and treating cancer. Even if I become a fringe alternative medicine provider the majority of people will seek mainstream treatment. Aside from the licensing issues there are payment issues at play. My insurance company just won't pay for the sweat lodge the same way they will pay for chemo. The result is that physicians enjoy relatively high salaries.

Yet that same regulatory framework failed to protect attorney salaries in the long term. one big reason is that the attorney framework was largely artificial. The current system ensures that a new attorney can pass a written exam but not that they are competent to function as lawyers. Add to that the realization that a person can do many of the things they previously paid lawyers for at a fraction of the cost and the bubble burst.

Regulation likewise didn't permanently preserve the case of the licensed fuel dispensers of New Jersey who were able to resist self-serve pumps for many years.

Regulation can, in certain applications, make things better. In others it can make things much worse. The same can be said of guilds or unions.

At the end of the day employers need employees. It isn't their responsibility to train an unskilled workforce into a skilled workforce. It is the responsibility of the workforce or, more accurately, the individuals who comprise that labor pool, to respond to the changing needs of the labor market. Governments tend to suck at it. Unions are biased. But the individual worker has the ability to quickly shift as needed.

 

That's the beauty of Wade's work. It isn't one vs. the other. It's both working in harmony, with each preponderating to varying degrees in various situations.

 

The article cited in the opening post indicates that many of the jobs open in Spain require advanced training, the kind of training one gets in a university. So why aren't the universities responding?

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-spain-say-whistleblowers/420782.article

 

I don't buy it, I met two gentlemen from Spain that immigrated to Canada with several Masters degrees each and unable to find work.

The issue might the same that happens here in Canada with IT. The IT industry always cries that there are not enough candidates but yet they won't hire our own graduates but bring people from India or other developing nations where the IT education is strong and have lower salaries. The typical example is an employer looking for a software developer with 10 years of experience and with knowledge of 10 programming languages willing to make 50K, the employer will post the ad and will get zero applicants that meet the requirement, then employer will cry and make a case for a working permit claiming that there are not enough candidates in Canada and find someone from India (A country with more than one billion people) that meets the criteria.

The real issue is that it is always cheaper to bring people from other parts of the world than training local people. I am sure that a lot of Spanish people could be trained for the jobs being advertised but it is just cheaper to bring them from Argentina or other Spanish speaking country where salaries and working conditions are lower than Spain.

Protectionism of local people might not be the answer but at least governments should push employers to first consider training rather than just finding a cheaper answer.

The economy changes constantly, there is no point to get a masters degree in a field in demand now when we know that chances are that those skills will not longer be in demand in the future so people will not train for those skills in shortage unless there is a commitment of employment from the employer.

 

That's generally how free markets work. Here, let's try another one...

I go to the grocery store and I want to buy tomato sauce. But I don't find the tomato sauce I want for the price I want so I go to Costco and I buy a giant case of tomato sauce. In the end, I get the tomato sauce I want for significantly less per fluid ounce than if I purchased it at the bodega around the corner.

I really think you over/under estimate this dynamic. It is not much cheaper to bring in a programmer from India with a lower salary than to hire a local employee. You don't just offer a lower salary and say "show up on Tuesday." You also have to offer visa sponsorship, relocation reimbursement and other perks to get someone to move clear across the globe. It takes time, money and effort to bring that person over and the net result is that you typically save, at best, a few dollars that you would have made up for in time savings with a local employee.

You're right though, that there are a lot of Americans and Canadians with Masters degrees in IT who cannot find work. The reason is that many of them don't have the skills necessary to compete in the industry.

"IT" is an umbrella term that is comprised of numerous specialty professions which are not at all interchangeable. I can't hire a network administrator to work as a software developer.

That doesn't stop unemployed network administrators from applying for the software developer jobs, however.

IT is one industry where everyone wants to work in it and feel all Silicon Valley. They want to wear sneakers to work and wear Buddy Holly glasses and say they work in "tech." However, only a relatively small portion of the people rushing into "tech" actually possess technical skills.

That's the reason why we see a surge in IT degrees that add no value to an employer, business degrees being branded as "tech" degrees and lots of people who insist that they are part of "tech" without having an actual skill that creates or improves anything.

There are plenty of those. If I post a job for anything even remotely tech sounding I can guarantee at least a dozen applicants who have no business applying for the job. Not a single qualification met save for the fact that they have a degree that sounds vaguely as though it might be tangentially related to the posting.

Employers aren't schools. There is no reason why a company should resort to turning an unskilled workforce into a skilled workforce with all of the time and expense that goes along with it when there are capable workers looking for a job.

Contrary to popular belief there was never a time in U.S. history when companies took unskilled laborers and trained them in advanced skills. One need only look at the ads for ICS from the 1940s to see that there was clearly a market for workers to improve themselves to make themselves more appealing to employers for promotions and hiring. It was also a time where a good number of technical skills were more or less transferable. If you could fix a washing machine you could probably, with a relatively short time spent in OJT, learn to fix a car of that era. Today knowing how to manage a database does not mean that you can develop a front end web application. And knowing how to develop a front end web application does not mean you know how to optimize a database or maintain security on a complex network.

Masters degrees are fine for what they are. Here's the course outline for the MS in IT at UMass Lowell. You'll notice it is heavy on networking. If a candidate for a software development job comes to me with this in hand then what, exactly, is supposed to impress me? Here's a degree program that requires C Programming proficiency. Even if you have that what am I to do if I need a developer who can hit the ground running with Ruby on Rails? Hire the person anyway and hope they can pick up the language needed for the job in the next six months? Why would I do that when I can find a Rails developer who can start working on day one?

People should probably stop thinking of IT as a singular topic and career path. It isn't. It's like saying "Business degrees are useless." Well, for many people they are. But an HR degree has a clearer career pathway than a degree in Business Administration. An accounting degree has a more well defined industry entry point than a degree in marketing etc.

And there are plenty of U.S./Canadian born people in the broad world of IT who are gainfully employed. Hiring a foreign employee doesn't save much money at all. It costs more in terms of time and risk. The only thing that would have a worse financial impact would be the idea of providing training.

 

I'm not sure what it is that you don't believe. You don't believe the unemployment numbers? They can be verified through multiple sources. You don't believe that companies can not find qualified people to fill positions? While this can also be verified it's contrary to logic that a company would deliberately not hire a qualified person into an open position. What would be their motive? They want their own company to fail? I think that the gist of the 2nd article I cited is that people might be coming out of Spanish universities with degrees but they are not actually skilled. The standards of these universities are quite low. There's a lot of corruption, etc. Maybe your friends are the exception but the facts are not in dispute.

 

I don't believe there is a real shortage but more that employers are not willing to pay for retraining .

 

Let my try to illustrate my point with an example, John Smith graduated with a BS in Computer Science in 1995, John got a job as a Cobol programmer for a large enterprise that was running a VAX station for its payroll system. In 1999, John lost his job as the company decided to upgrade to a network system so his skills were not longer needed. After two years of looking for work, John decided to go back to school to get a MS in Computer Science in networking, the school had a Novel network and all their courses were based on this platform. When John graduated in 2003, the market did not longer required Novell network administrators but Windows administrators, after one year of looking for work, John decided to take a Microsoft boot camp for 6 months so he can earn a MSCE in networking, he finally got an offer in 2005 as a Windows network administrator at a large company. In 2015, John's company announced that they have decided to go for a Cloud computing solution and outsource all their networking services to India. John was let go in 2015. After a year of looking for work, he goes for an interview with Neuhaus an HR manager at a large corporation, Neuhaus after looking at his resume, tells him that his skills are dated as now is all about Cloud computing and that the government just announced that they will increase their H1B visas due to a shortage of cloud computing professionals, Neuhaus explains to John that this is how free market works and that he should join a Masters or a certificate program in cloud computing as nobody cares about Windows administration anymore.
After the meeting with Neuhaus, he feels hopeless so he enrolls in a real estate agent program as he cannot take anymore IT and he feels that leads to endless training with no results.
Finally, John decides to attend a Donald Trump's rally near his community as he heard that he might do something about this open market idea that has benefit so much America.

I have been in this industry for more than 25 years and have seen many John Smiths give up and change careers while the government keeps telling us that there is a shortage but always in a different IT field. People just give up at some point.

 

Maybe we're playing semantics but it could be said that if the workers all require retraining it means that they don't have the skills necessary to do the job. So that means they are unskilled for the positions which is what the article says. They don't have the skills.

 

Well, it sounds like John made a poor choice in choosing an MS in networking as a means to facilitate a career transition. And yes, being a Cobol programmer and then trying to move into networking is a career transition despite them both being "IT."

John could have also attended the boot camp first thing and hit the job market with less debt and a more relevant credential. It would be like if I lost my job because HR functions were replaced by an amazing AI system and then chose to go into a two year Masters program to train for a new career. That's fine if the Masters is the clearest path to the new career (i.e. I decide to become a Professional Counselor or a Social Worker). If I am trying to move into a technical area then the technical skills are more likely to get me a job. With a B.S.C.S. on hand, John Smith already had sufficient education to make the leap. And an MS in CS is not the most efficient way of developing skills in networking.

You're right. Neuhaus would have, and routinely does, exactly that. Because Neuhaus has a line of qualified applicants applying for a job posting alongside the mass of unqualified applicants. Also, not every company is running top of the line everything. I have spoken to recruiters who work in higher ed who tell me that languages that have gone the way of Latin are often still sought after because even top tier universities don't necessary invest in their IT infrastructure the same way that corporations do. Maybe John would have found work if he was willing to move wherever the work was. But I'd bet John has a laundry list of excuses about why he can't leave his single employer town and uproot his family to be in a place where he can make a meaningful living.

Here's the part that you didn't address in your story:

John takes a 6 month boot camp and earns an MCSE after wasting two years on a Masters. The MCSE would have likely resulted in him getting a job much sooner, and with less debt, than a Masters particularly given the fact that he was making a shift from Cobol to networking. If you want a Masters degree to become the entry level credential for tech then frivolously earning them is a surefire way to do it.

Second, John had a 10 year run at the large company he worked at from 2005 until 2015. John surely heard rumblings that they were making a shift to the cloud. And yet, John didn't go out and earn an Oracle Cloud certification, did he? Nope, he just sat back and allowed career obsolescence to swallow him up for the second time.

Why should a company be forced to drag John kicking and screaming into the next phase of his career when there are people lined up around the block with the needed credentials that John refuses to earn?

Now before you jump on it and say it's unreasonable for John to constantly keep pace with the ever changing world of IT I want you to consider how you'd feel about that if John was a physician or a lawyer. If you get diagnosed with cancer do you want the doctor who couldn't be bothered keeping up with the latest trends or the physician who cares enough to stay current? And do you care if the most qualified applicant was born in the U.S. or not? Because I have a feeling when you are the consumer of those services you tend to take a more free market approach than trying to force corporations to basically become public welfare bureaus.

 

Hi,

I know it is almost impossible to win with you but I just wanted to make a point. Bottom line is that the problem is not as simple as it seems, people get tired of always training for a moving target and then being blamed that they don't have the right skills by politicians and HR people.
I will not post more answer to this thread as I have nothing to win.