Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Look at your own examples of jobs that you presume don’t require experience. Cake decorators, CAD operators, cosmetologists, daycare teachers…most of them heavily and directly weighted towards discretionary spending. This is not an opinion; it’s a matter of truth. Even with CAD, a good engineer, architect or industrial designer ought to know how to use CAD on his own without having to hire another person to do the job. Welders, swiss machinists, tool and dye operators and the likes are a different case. These, an industrial economy cannot do without and cannot settle for average skills. Even outside oil pipe construction, only highly-skilled welders can work on infrastructure projects, shipbuilding, furnace maintenance, etc. And unlike plumbing, you cannot postpone their work lest you want to settle for inferior products and services. That’s also the case for other high-skilled blue collar workers.
So you are saying that someone who is just out of a two year trade proram has nothing to offer in the work place? Did you not start someplace? Why would you pay an engineer to do what a CAD operator can do? And frankly many machinists positions require a week of training and then taht's as good as it gets. Ever.
Daycare teachers are crucial to our economy, or are you one of those men who thinks that once a woman replicates she should stay home and take care of the kids?
The point is that we do need people in the trades, and they all start someplace. Where and how do you expect them to learn the basics if not in vo-tech?
Quote:
Let’s put it in a more obvious way. If your blue collar workforce consists of cake decorators, daycare teachers, cosmetologists and culinary workers, what kind of GDP breakdown do you suppose the US will have?
So you think that they add no value to society?
Quote:
And don’t forget any of my prior posts too soon. Of course, the good practitioners started somewhere. Most of them started way before they got to high school by working in scrap metal yards, helping dads repair tractors in the farm our lending a hand in repair shops when they were kids while typical middle class children were playing soccer and loafing around in their free time. What about those who need to start from square one at vo-tech? Hopefully the government can “convince” companies to hire them entry-level like they do in Germany. But what’s next? In the States, they will lose their jobs during the next recession and what’s happening now is that they cannot find a similar job in their respective fields. That’s what I’m concerned about when I think about vo-tech. It’s the long term and anecdotes from an anonymous poster won’t cut it.
Then you obviously ahve a low opinion of the skills taht are learned in a vo-tech program. The company I work for just hired a recent Vo-Tech grad, and the guy is running circles around some of the guys who ahve been in this line of work for years. And BTW--the German economy isn't exactly booming either.
Quote:
I told you my solution. You just didn’t get it. You’ll need to do a lot more first than merely convincing more people to take vo-tech or forcing companies to hire entry-levels. You will need to have an economy that is more geared towards production, rather than consumptio
Quote:
n so that people will have the incentive to acquire the right skills (ie, swiss machinist vs. cake decorator) for the long haul. Until that happens, flipping burgers is probably what will await them.
Without consumption, there's no reason to produce.
Of the ones you specified, only about half are crucial to an industrialized country. The others like video production, cosmetology (excluding necrological cosmetology) depend on excessive consumption. Of the ones that are crucial, vo-tech is not enough to be competent in the field. You need to put in years of experience to be an expert heavy equipment mechanic or swiss machinist. Someone 5 years out of welding vo-tech with nothing else cannot perform an xray-invisible weld, which is what oilpipe builders look for.
Which brings me to my point. In the US, demand for such crucial trades are unpredictable and unreliable, ultimately driven by the same underlying consumer-based spending that also drives trades like cosmetology and culinary arts. Why would someone put in years to be a master welder when he can see his trade vanish in the next economic cycle?
Excessive consumerism has to be addressed first for vo-tech to be viable.
I think you are mistaken. You may be thinking of things based on what YOU would spend your money on versus what you consider excess. Also, don't delude yourself-- most of all of the major economies are still built on the premise of consumption.
I asked my hairdresser if her business has slowed down during the downturn in the economy. She said absolutely not. In fact, her business has been booming. She said she likened it to the fact that women (and men) can't really go on vacation or go to a spa, etc but they can afford to get their hair cut. Now obviously some of the very impoverished can't (I have been there in college where I cut my own hair for example), but for the most part her clientele has increased (as has the salon in general). They have in fact extended business hours and are open one extra day a week to meet the demand. I remember taking a course about the history of markets and one of the markets that continues to do well during the depression, times of war-- is cosmetics. A woman may not be able to buy a new dress or new shoes, but most women are able to afford a new lipstick, eyeshadow, etc. It kind of correlates to the fact that my French grandma worked as a hairdresser to support her family during WWII when her husband had no job.
That’s what I said. Even assuming you’re correct, it would take years to become a competent LPN. Personally, I think the need and pricing for LPN services is exaggerated but I’ll leave that to a thread about healthcare.
Anecdotal, at best. But you can use common sense to throw away this argument. Compare the consequences of having a cheap and inexperienced wedding cake designer versus the consequences of having a cheap and inexperienced oil pipe welder. And you can’t count on cake decorators to sustain an industrialized economy, along with cosmetologists.
It was you who gave the example of welding. I just gave the facts surrounding the field. Why diminish your own example now? OK, here are other fields that demand experience – HVAC, plumbing, swiss machinist, tool & dye technicians. Even autobody repair requires a high degree of skills and experience. Porsche and Mercedes Benz require this for technicians certified to work on their cars. Unless you’re referring to sundry mechanics.
Plumbing is a regulated field that requires a license in many states. That's why you can say it won't go away. Most fields in vo-tech don’t avail of the same level of regulation.
It works well in anecdotal cases where people can commit to the trade over the long haul. Good for them. But for the thousands of construction workers, oil welders, swiss machinists and the likes who lose their jobs in every economic cycle, a long-term commitment to a trade is hard to make.
I am really losing your point. You talk about years of experience as if kids coming out of vo tech programs will sit stagnant and not gain a job because they are not already operating at a master level.
Yes, an LPN or RN will come out of nursing school with marginal experience-- as will a doctor, as will a lawyer, as will an accountant, as will a teacher, as will a welder, plumber, the list goes on and on and on and on.
As the other poster said, when my car breaks I am going to need to take it to someone (I could care less about trying to repair my own car). That someone can not be offshored. When I want to eat at a nice dining establishment, someone will have to wait on me and cook my food.
Depending on the machinery job-- it may not necessarily have to be done in this country (my uncle is a machinist and a good portion of his company offshores work now). I can't speak about welding because I know very little about what a welder would do aside from I know that my bike was welded together at a factory here in the US. Some jobs like heavy machinery (I have another uncle who specialized in major machinery-- i.e. cruise ships, cargo ships, etc). People that he worked with came from all over the world based on their skills and their expertise. The job was pretty glamorous (he travelled ALL over the world with lots of downtime and a very handsome paycheck). Of course he didn't get this job immediately out of technical school.
I don't really see offshoring as a terrible thing for the nation on a whole. For the people it impacts directly-- yes it is awful especially if you are not well suited to take on new skills or diversify your work (like my uncle did when he began doing major machinery work). Offshoring to cheaper parts of the world provides our economy with efficiencies to invest time and resources into other services, skills, manufacturing, etc. In my own world for example, why would I pay countless people here in the US higher wages to enter data into a database when I can pay 1/2 of that cost overseas in India? For data entry, they do a phenomenal job and have consistently maintained higher quality scores than their American counterparts in the company. Now onshore, I increased the amount of analysts, systems folks, etc-- so that we can focus our time and resources on figuring out how to automate many of the data entry tasks that even the associates in India do. We may be spending more in employment costs now (if you look at things on a macro scale), but the amount of money we are spending on onshore jobs are distributed among higher skilled workers than just a data entry clerk. We have outsourced certain jobs to places like India and found that- eh those jobs were not done so well (lack of oversight, the ability to think out of the box, differences in goals and management) so we onshored them back.
Look at your own examples of jobs that you presume don’t require experience. Cake decorators, CAD operators, cosmetologists, daycare teachers…most of them heavily and directly weighted towards discretionary spending. This is not an opinion; it’s a matter of truth. Even with CAD, a good engineer, architect or industrial designer ought to know how to use CAD on his own without having to hire another person to do the job. Welders, swiss machinists, tool and dye operators and the likes are a different case. These, an industrial economy cannot do without and cannot settle for average skills. Even outside oil pipe construction, only highly-skilled welders can work on infrastructure projects, shipbuilding, furnace maintenance, etc. And unlike plumbing, you cannot postpone their work lest you want to settle for inferior products and services. That’s also the case for other high-skilled blue collar workers.
Let’s put it in a more obvious way. If your blue collar workforce consists of cake decorators, daycare teachers, cosmetologists and culinary workers, what kind of GDP breakdown do you suppose the US will have?
And don’t forget any of my prior posts too soon. Of course, the good practitioners started somewhere. Most of them started way before they got to high school by working in scrap metal yards, helping dads repair tractors in the farm our lending a hand in repair shops when they were kids while typical middle class children were playing soccer and loafing around in their free time. What about those who need to start from square one at vo-tech? Hopefully the government can “convince†companies to hire them entry-level like they do in Germany. But what’s next? In the States, they will lose their jobs during the next recession and what’s happening now is that they cannot find a similar job in their respective fields. That’s what I’m concerned about when I think about vo-tech. It’s the long term and anecdotes from an anonymous poster won’t cut it.
I told you my solution. You just didn’t get it. You’ll need to do a lot more first than merely convincing more people to take vo-tech or forcing companies to hire entry-levels. You will need to have an economy that is more geared towards production, rather than consumption so that people will have the incentive to acquire the right skills (ie, swiss machinist vs. cake decorator) for the long haul. Until that happens, flipping burgers is probably what will await them.
A course, a good engineer or architect can use CAD--- but that is NOT the point. I have an accounting degree-- but it is not an efficient use of my time to spend the day entering invoices or manually calculating a paycheck for an associate. My skills lie in process improvements and systems analysis. I am pulled off of the shelf when we have issues that have shown up and I figure out the root cause based on a plethora of reasons both systematic and business rule driven. Of course there are many other job responsibilities, but it makes no sense for me to do some of the lower level work. It is the same for other professions. A doctor is just as competent (although here comes the debate that he may be less competent than a nurse who spends her day doing the job day to day) to give shots, take vitals, etc. However he may not be as fast just like I am definitely as fast in keying data into a system because I don't spend my day keying data.
Btw-- most vo-tech jobs may have some component of interest that developed when a person was a child. Don't think for a minute that there will be a swarming of kids to culinary school who have never made a piece of toast. Same even applies to nurses or hair stylists or vet techs or even horse shoers (an actual profitable job my farrier rakes it in and works only for himself average price of 100.00 for 30 min of work with 10 appointments daily-- hard on the back but he admits this and said he has quite the nest egg for his family). Typically people go into a trade that has some bearing of interest for them-- I doubt it would change with vo-tech schools-- sure you will have some students who enter programs where they did not have much experience or exposure to the occupation as a kid, but most people tend to like to choose careers where there is a semblance of interest or past experience. And keep in mind at the end of the day, there will still be some kids who have no desire to go to vo tech schools or college-- and they will end up doing those lower level jobs that are undesirable but still have a demand (janitorial work, mcdonalds, etc).
Our economy is less of a production, manufacturing economy. I don't foresee that changing any time soon-- especially now that the economy is global. We are a services economy more so than anything. I don't see the day where we will have factories full of people making widgets when those widgets can be made for a fraction of a cost abroad. Personally, I don't want to pay a significantly higher cost to purchase something made locally versus what I can pay for the same product that was made abroad. (Although there are some things I like to buy that ARE american made-- food, cat food, cars built here, etc).
I may sue my school, I recently graduated and am taking a three month unpaid internship. I went to a better school, higher GPA, and some experience.
She has a job offer *slaps head*
Quote:
A graduate with a bachelor degree of Business Administration in IT since this past April, Thompson claims in her handwritten lawsuitthat Monroe's Office of Career Advancement "hasn't tried hard enough to help." To add merit to her case against Monroe when discussing her complaint with various media outlets, Thompson boasts a good attendance record and a 2.7 GPA, despite having overlooked multiple spelling errors in her complaint like, "tutision" and "reinbursement."
Most Business Administration degree-holders do indeed look forward to job offers. The degree ranks number two on our list of College Degrees With The Most Job Offers and the Thompson case might have stood up in court if she hadn't been offered a job already. Thompson's media attention and IT degree have landed her a job offer at theskichannel.com, where she will soon be offered a job via a press release.
Steve Bellamy, CEO of theskichannel.com, told Forbes, "I don't know if I think she's really cool or if I think she's just a person taking advantage, but we're willing to take a chance. She's made a lot of noise. She seems hungry."
Monroe does not make our list of 50 Best Colleges, but Bellamy is not concerned with either that or Thompson's 2.7 GPA. "I certainly hope she does better [at the ski channel], but I'm no one to complain," he said, "I don't know that [my GPA] was much higher." Bellamy announced his offer over a week ago but has not yet heard back from Thompson. He plans to reach out to Thompson officially in an upcoming press release.
I may sue my school, I recently graduated and am taking a three month unpaid internship. I went to a better school, higher GPA, and some experience.
She has a job offer *slaps head*
Totally feel your pain. I went to one of the best education schools in the country and can not find a teaching job. I also have experience and worked while I was in school.
Totally feel your pain. I went to one of the best education schools in the country and can not find a teaching job. I also have experience and worked while I was in school.
My state, Arkansas, needs teachers.
What subject(s) are you qualified to teach and what grades?
As it turns out, though, apparently the school where she graduated made certain written guarantees regarding job placement that they did not follow through on. Given that, her lawsuit seems meritorious.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
