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Yes, this is very true. Most companies aren't going to keep you long enough to spend lots of money to train you. In the old days you expected to be at the same

Yes, this is very true. Most companies aren't going to keep you long enough to spend lots of money to train you. In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. These days you're lucky if you are there for five. Training should really start at the high school level. It's a disgrace that most students graduate from 12+ years of school without the training to get a good job but they can attend a codecamp for 1 year and get a starting job as a coder. It's no wonder we have a large number of workers that feel the american dream is slipping away. They never learned the skills they need to survive and thrive in our current economic system. What's even sadder is that leaders are not focusing in this part of the problem but instead in silliness like who uses what bathroom. Things need to change.

prawn 9y ago
Should apply this thinking to things like personal finance/budgeting. You can do Accounting at high school level and walk away with very little practical knowledge that applies directly to getting by in real life.
csydas 9y ago
Well, one of the potential pitfalls with practical skills only is that you end up with a lot of skill-based workers without a strong understanding of what it is they're actually doing. Most Tech stuff is a healthy mixture of theory and practical skills, often changing on a day to day basis for any given tech job. Dealing with clients who have little theoretical knowledge about the infrastructure they're maintaining is incredibly difficult as they just don't have the background to understand why there are performance issues, or why an error happens, and so on, simply because they weren't really trained to understand it, they were trained "You click this to do X, this to do Y". I am not suggesting everyone needs to be an expert in everything, but a lot of modern IT infrastructure teeters on the precipice of a complete disaster; they're the IT equivalent of "Knows enough to to damage" type users in an end-user setting, and the software is specifically set up to accommodate such users. This isn't necessarily bad; easy to use software for running mission critical software is great for everyone, but there are a lot of skills where you really need to know more than "Click this to do X" to be successful and tenable. As an aside regarding your comment on leadership focus, people can handle multiple problems at once. It's a bit strange to write off someone else's problem as silliness just because it doesn't directly affect you.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. These days you're lucky if you are there for five. It sounds like you want to shift the onus of training from the organization that benefits from the training to taxpayers and workers. Why is that? Why not try to shift the employer/employee leverage balance to incentivize employers to again train its labor force, provide long-term employment, and give an improving quality of life to its workers? It's not like people stopped being long-term employees for no reason. Employers stopped showing loyalty because they didn't need to anymore. Given the fact that wages have been stagnant since the 70's when trickle-down economics were enacted, yet large corporations have seen massive gains, wouldn't you say it's time for a different approach to the direction of our economy? This is all also assuming that Americans need a combination of experience and education to get ahead, which is just false. Education does help, but only pockets of highly populated areas of the country are experiencing growth at the moment. The rest is stagnating or on the decline... But that is a different issue that involves the dissolution of anti-trust laws more than an employer/employee leverage shift[1]. [1] http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
deleted 9y ago
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pm90 9y ago
This is a problem that many people are trying to solve. The current US education system is geared towards producing mostly blue collar workers, and promoting a few geniuses to white collar by funneling them to Universities. We definitely need to change it to emphasize more on practical skills, or at least skills that encourage further learning. I imagine a kid who loves learning would be capable of picking up skills like Mathematics etc. reasonably well, while a trained but burned out PhD mathematician might just have lost all love for his anointed subject. I've actually seen this happen firsthand as a college student: my fellow students who had worked intensely through prep schools were absolutely burnt out by the effort and had no interest in academics for the first couple of years.

prawn 9y ago

Should apply this thinking to things like personal finance/budgeting. You can do Accounting at high school level and walk away with very little practical knowledge that applies directly to getting by in real life.

csydas 9y ago

Well, one of the potential pitfalls with practical skills only is that you end up with a lot of skill-based workers without a strong understanding of what it is they're actually doing. Most Tech stuff is a healthy mixture of theory and practical skills, often changing on a day to day basis for any given tech job. Dealing with clients who have little theoretical knowledge about the infrastructure they're maintaining is incredibly difficult as they just don't have the background to understand why there are performance issues, or why an error happens, and so on, simply because they weren't really trained to understand it, they were trained "You click this to do X, this to do Y". I am not suggesting everyone needs to be an expert in everything, but a lot of modern IT infrastructure teeters on the precipice of a complete disaster; they're the IT equivalent of "Knows enough to to damage" type users in an end-user setting, and the software is specifically set up to accommodate such users. This isn't necessarily bad; easy to use software for running mission critical software is great for everyone, but there are a lot of skills where you really need to know more than "Click this to do X" to be successful and tenable. As an aside regarding your comment on leadership focus, people can handle multiple problems at once. It's a bit strange to write off someone else's problem as silliness just because it doesn't directly affect you.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

> In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. These days you're lucky if you are there for five. It sounds like you want to shift the onus of training from the organization that benefits from the training to taxpayers and workers. Why is that? Why not try to shift the employer/employee leverage balance to incentivize employers to again train its labor force, provide long-term employment, and give an improving quality of life to its workers? It's not like people stopped being long-term employees for no reason. Employers stopped showing loyalty because they didn't need to anymore. Given the fact that wages have been stagnant since the 70's when trickle-down economics were enacted, yet large corporations have seen massive gains, wouldn't you say it's time for a different approach to the direction of our economy? This is all also assuming that Americans need a combination of experience and education to get ahead, which is just false. Education does help, but only pockets of highly populated areas of the country are experiencing growth at the moment. The rest is stagnating or on the decline... But that is a different issue that involves the dissolution of anti-trust laws more than an employer/employee leverage shift[1]. [1] http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pm90 9y ago

This is a problem that many people are trying to solve. The current US education system is geared towards producing mostly blue collar workers, and promoting a few geniuses to white collar by funneling them to Universities. We definitely need to change it to emphasize more on practical skills, or at least skills that encourage further learning. I imagine a kid who loves learning would be capable of picking up skills like Mathematics etc. reasonably well, while a trained but burned out PhD mathematician might just have lost all love for his anointed subject. I've actually seen this happen firsthand as a college student: my fellow students who had worked intensely through prep schools were absolutely burnt out by the effort and had no interest in academics for the first couple of years.