it is not true for all companies. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that if you are a business owner, running a factory, and your competitors factory doe

it is not true for all companies. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that if you are a business owner, running a factory, and your competitors factory doesn't train then you would have an advantage by training. We do lots of training, because nobody has the skills for our exact setup. I have paid for plenty of training that walked out the door into a new job 6 months later. Life goes on. I look for high intelligence people, and then train them in house. High intelligence people can get trained in a fraction of the time, and not every high intelligence person went to college to become a programmer. I think the skills gap could be more about the draining of intelligent people from blue collar jobs. I went to high school in the 80's and there was a very strong push for "college/computers good, working with hands bad" message from the guidance counselors. I have a person who just graduated from University with good grades in Psychology and English. She applied for 87 jobs from March to July with no luck; now she is one of the robot operators. She says she makes more money doing this than any job she could get with her degree. Perhaps some of the skills challenge is too many white collar path people, not wanting to go to manufacturing for any reason. (my good worker is heading to grad school in a few months though, sad for me).