They got rid of their training programs so that workers would have to acquire new skills at their own expense. Then they were surprised that a dearth of the wo

They got rid of their training programs so that workers would have to acquire new skills at their own expense. Then they were surprised that a dearth of the workers wanted to acquire skills that are only useful for employees at a tiny subset of companies, who refuse to pay more for them, and instead most went for more portable, more universal skills. But they still don't want to pay more for the niche skills that they require--the skills that no one is acquiring because the marginal benefit of acquiring them do not pay the cost of the training. And they don't want to change their business model to work better with the skilled employees who have the more commonly learned skills. This seems like all that would be required to fix it is an economic understanding at the most basic level--supply and demand. Pay more to employees already suitable, or pay to train those who are not, but have sufficient aptitude to become so. Labor skills are a service product, and the market finds a price for them just the same as every other product. If you can't buy what you need, you got outbid. There seems to be some flaw in business management education if managers are ignorant of this, and some flaw in public policy education if the managers are not ignorant, but just pretending to be, in order to get government concessions. Somewhere along the line is a person that needs to re-take Econ 101. For the question of "What if we train them and they leave for a competitor?" it doesn't take much to work that out with thought experiments. The game-theory analysis says that each individual company is better off ending its in-house training program and poaching its trained employees from another company, with the greatest advantage going to the company that does this first. So the Nash equilibrium is for no companies to have their own training programs, and therefore for no companies to have access to trained employees, while the optimal group benefit occurs when every company has a training program, and trains rather than poaches. The obvious solution is to cartelize the competitors, such that they all agree to contribute to a common training program, and give at least a minimum pay raise to every employee trained by it. There are a variety of ways to make that happen. A union could run the program, and force the businesses who are hiring its members to pay for it, by threat of embargo. A government could tax the businesses, and use the tax to fund a professorship at the public university, required to teach certain classes. The businesses themselves could create certifications, and jointly control the certification body, such that certain certification levels meet some common needs of all participating companies, while those seeking certification pay all the costs of the training program. Or, one businesses could pay more to prospective employees that strategically acquire niche skills, as a means of encouraging them to actually train themselves. If you're running a business, you can't just sit on ass and expect the world to just cater to your needs. The world wants money.