It's true that over the past 30 years, education and skill requirements for jobs have been rising, as a Pew Research Center study recently found.
But that long-term shift doesn't totally explain why jobs have been sitting open since the Great Recession ended. The U.S. hasn't experienced the massive wage growthyou'd expect from a shortage of workers, although wages did start rising last year. Many economists say that if there were a shortage of workers, wages would be going up more.
They say the lack of wage growth proves the U.S. has a demand problem — not enough good jobs — rather than a supply problem — not enough skilled workers. The idea that all we need to do is train workers is "fundamentally an evasion of a profound social challenge," former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said during a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution last year in Washington, D.C.
"The national skills gap notion is a fallacy, because there's no national labor market. There are regional labor markets," said Lesley Hirsch, director of the New York City Labor Market Information Service. Regional labor markets have slightly different dynamics depending on the industry mix and the types of workers there.
The head of Minnesota's Labor Market Information Office, Steve Hine, knows this well. Twice a year, Hine's staff surveys a cross section of Minnesota companies to ask them about their openings. In 2012 and 2013, it followed up with employers looking for workers in health care, engineering, manufacturing and information technology — fields supposedly suffering from a skills gap.
When hiring was difficult, employers gave multiple explanations for it. In 2013, for example, Minnesota manufacturers said two-thirds of all their openings were hard to fill, but that only 14 percent of positions remained open purely because applicants didn't have the right education and training.
Instead, most employers had a hard time filling jobs because of a mix of factors. A lack of applicants with the right skills was one reason. But there were many others, including location, low wages and undesirable shifts.
"The job is not that specialized," one manufacturer said of a position it had trouble filling. The problem was finding someone willing to live in a small town and work long hours for low pay.
The surveys also found that the qualification many employers wanted most was prior work experience in a similar role.
"We always have difficulties filling this position because we require specific experience in test engineering in the electronics industry. There might be total of 150 qualified people in the Midwest!" said one employer of industrial engineers.
To Hine, the focus on work experience suggested that employers were being too picky. They wanted to hire someone who could be fully productive on day one. But at the same time they weren't willing or able to pay enough to attract that perfect candidate.
Recent job vacancy surveys from Minnesota and several other states continue to show that a mix of factors makes jobs hard to fill. Oregon's latest survey notes that about half of jobs there are difficult to fill for reasons that would be hard to address through workforce development, such as unfavorable working conditions or inconsistent work shifts.
It's worth noting that employers can't always diagnose their own problems. Only 22 percent of employers surveyed by Utah's Department of Workforce Services last year named low wages as a hiring problem, but 68 percent of those employers were offering below average wages.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/11/14/Its-Not-Skills-Gap-Why-So-Many-Jobs-Are-Going-Unfilled