“Skills Gap” Myth Falls, GOP/Media Complex Gives Kim Kardashian More Attention

Via Kay over at Balloon Juice, I found this NYT editorial from last week that blows the “skills gap” myth to smithereens:

Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School, has noted sharply different opinions between corporate executives, who typically say that schools are failing to give workers the skills they need, and the people who actually do the hiring, who say the real obstacles are traditional ones like lack of on-the-job experience. In addition, when there are many more applicants than jobs, employers tend to impose overexacting criteria and then wait for the perfect match. They also offer tightfisted pay packages. What employers describe as talent shortages are often failures to agree on salary.

If a business really needed workers, it would pay up. That is not happening, which calls into question the existence of a skills gap as well as the urgency on the part of employers to fill their openings. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “recruiting intensity” — that is, business efforts to fill job openings — has been low in this recovery. Employers may be posting openings, but they are not trying all that hard to fill them, say, by increasing job ads or offering better pay packages.

And unless you read the NYT’s editorial pages often, or visit Balloon Juice often, you probably missed this because the news sources most commonly used or encountered in America were too busy following Kim Kardashian’s every move.