Trumpled (Alternative Leading)

[mateinone]

The other big joke about the skill shortage is that there has ALWAYS been a skill shortage.
In that were most of us actually skilled to do our first jobs in our respective industries, or were we hired and learned the skills on the job.

In one particular instance I had been hired to in a new team to do a certain job, they realised there was a critical skill set missing in the team for a particular product. They asked me in my 2nd week would I be prepared to learn that product an become the SME (Subject Matter Expert) for that, rather than the Operating System (AIX Unix) that I was originally hired for. This was a product the entire organisation relied on for recovery and operability... I said yes and they spent  about 5,000-6,000 sending me on a course for a week and gave me some manuals to read.

I was given a basic overview of the environment, some topology maps and asked to take it over, guess what... I (and the company) survived, like many others before me had. This used to be normal practise, I have since sent my staff on training to cover skill gaps, but companies are now loathe to spend the money (in actual cash or in work hours) to train staff, be they new or current. Someone in a company somewhere decided that workers are transient and the training budget could be saved and others followed suit.

I am hoping one of the benefits of this will be that employers see it as a responsibility of the business leaders of today to train the next generation the same way most of us were trained on the job. Because this selfish generation of maximum profits at the cost of minimizing investment in local talent is doing nothing to help this country.

To compare the differences, when I got into IT, I worked in a department of about 40 employees with a wage budget of about 2.2 - 2.4 million and about $100,000  in training expenses (thousands of hours of paying wages whilst training). So about 4-6% of the wage budget for training (plus probably another 4% in time dedicated to training)

In one of my last roles, I had around 100-120 employees  in total under me with a wage budget of perhaps 15 million and a training budget of $0. We managed training, but only through leveraging our relationships with vendors to supply our staff with training. We could not spend at all.

It is an absolute joke that companies can claim a skill shortage that they created should mean they can employ outside of the country.