A group of mainly corporate executives and educators advising the Trump administration on work force policy called for “immediate and unprecedented investments in American workers,” both for training and help in finding jobs. And even before the pandemic, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had proposed investing $50 billion in work force training.
In Congress, there is bipartisan support for giving jobless workers a $4,000 training credit.
The Markle Foundation has proposed federally funded “opportunity accounts” of up to $15,000 for workers to spend on training. Union leaders have helped the administration in an effort to expand federal apprenticeship programs to a wide range of industries.
Past downturns have brought increased government aid for workers and training programs. But labor experts say they have tended to be policies that recede once the economy recovers, as happened after the 2008 financial crisis, rather than becoming national priorities.
“The Great Recession was a lost opportunity,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “Now, are we going to take this moment to help low-wage workers move into the middle class and give them skills to thrive? Or are they just going to go back to low-wage jobs that are dead ends?”
In the coronavirus economy, companies are adopting more automation, as they seek to cut costs and increase efficiency. There is debate about which jobs are most at risk and how soon. But climbing up the skills ladder is the best way to stay ahead of the automation wave.
mechapoitier on July 15th, 2020 at 14:04 UTC »
That’s great news but if it doesn’t come with a concurrent trend toward higher wages it’s not going to work.
There are so many industries either collapsing, being underfunded or being looted from the top that it makes half the available degrees at universities totally worthless.
I know this might fall on deaf ears (or blind eyes) here since there are a lot of STEM grads on Reddit but the economic reality of a lot of training we’ve already received is we emerge barely able to survive economically on the other end.
ponieslovekittens on July 15th, 2020 at 13:40 UTC »
I think there's a lie at the core of this.
The american workforce is already lagrely overskilled and overqualified for the vast majority of the work that exists. Talk to your grocery store clerk or coffee barista. A lot of them know graphic design, or accounting, or similar. Talk to the minimum wage sales guy at your local computer store. A lot of them could be dropped into tech support roles pretty easily.
I worked a windows 10 upgrade uproject a year ago that had two programmers and a guy with windows server background doing a job that you could literally train any high school kid to do in a couple days. My roommates has been working customer service for years, but has the desktop support knowledge to jump into a tier II role pretty easily. And on and on.
This idea that the US workforce is underskilled is nonsense. HR departments have an inflated sense of what's actually required to do anything. ~25 years ago I was doing warranty hardware repairs on Toshiba and Compaq laptops without any degree or special training. Today, people expect thousands of hours of training just to cut somebody's hair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_inflation
"There are some occupations which used to require a high school diploma, such as construction supervisors, loans officers, insurance clerks and executive assistants, that are increasingly requiring a bachelor's degree. Some jobs that formerly required candidates to have a bachelor's degree, such as becoming a director in the federal government, tutoring students, or being a history tour guide in a historic site, now require a master's degree. Some jobs that used to require a master's degree, such as junior scientific researcher positions and sessional lecturer jobs, now require a PhD. Also, some jobs that formerly required only a PhD, such as university professor positions, are increasingly requiring one or more postdoctoral fellowship appointments. Often increased requirements are simply a way to reduce the number of applicants to a position. The increasingly global nature of competitions for high-level positions may also be another cause of credential creep"
MitchHedberg on July 15th, 2020 at 13:20 UTC »
This is the biggest challenge I have. I've been dying to go back and get more education for 4-5 years but there are so many challenge.
seemingly the only evening programs are MBA type BS which isn't the direction I want to go nor will particularly help my career right now.
Even if I did find other content, finding a way to cough up a few $k a year is extremely difficult when you're the primary bread winner.
time. I'm already expected to work 9-12 hours a day, how do you find the time and energy to develop yourself and so much as maintain an house/apartment or exercise or eat anything other than trash?
jobs don't pay for nor allocate time for training. I remember as an undergraduate being told over and over never pay for your masters your job will pay for that. Ha! What a load of shit.
I need a day more a week, available programs, and financing. Instead I've got modern indentured servitude.