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Companies don't want to train because they know they can potentially have 100-300 people lined up for a job with the experience they want. In their minds, even if an employee has the drive, the attitude, the work ethic and willingness to learn to do the job well and fit in, why should they take the time when 100 other people who know skills A-Z can be hired?
That's simply not what is the reality in some fields. My company has been looking to fill a position since October without success. (Really, it has been longer than that, but we restarted our recruiting effort in October.) We had one resume out of dozens that looked promising, but we couldn't even get the employee to return our call. About a month ago, I brought in a well-respected headhunter I know personally, an expert at recruiting talent in that discipline. Her assessment was razor sharp: Loads of jobs available but very few qualified candidates in the marketplace. Apparently, all the good talent has found new positions that they're happy with, and there are practically no good candidates left.
Yet the phenomenon outlined in the OP still happens in in our field. Why? Because companies are gun-shy about training employees knowing that they can snarf up that training and then bolt to a better job somewhere else. Why? Here's why:
A year and a half ago, we hired an entry level employee. He is okay, I suppose, but clearly couldn't just step into anything we do and contribute self-sufficiently. We started training the entry level employee to take over some work that a mid-level employee had been doing, with a mind toward freeing the mid-level employee up so he could ascend into a more principal role. After a year and a half of training, we began transitioning responsibility for the work from the mid-level employee to the entry level employee, and began training the mid-level employee for the more advanced work. Last week, the entry level employee quit to take a job elsewhere.
It isn't just that our plans were disrupted. It isn't just that we paid for someone's training and got no benefit from that training. But we also paid the entry level employee's salary for a year and a half and got relatively little for that money. We also incurred the cost of having the mid-level employee spent a lot of his time working to bring the entry level employee through his training, supervising him, etc. And worst of all, think about the impact of this phenomenon on the mid-level employee, who was promised advancement, and now faces the prospect of continuing to do that entry level work, and/or restarting the year and a half to bring someone green up to speed so that they could take over the entry level work. The cost of this one entry level employee leaving for a better job is prodigious and cannot be measured simply in dollars.
The entry level employee didn't do anything wrong. He's a smart kid, and to be honest, objectively speaking from an outsider's perspective, he made all the right moves. But it should be obvious why companies are reticent to hire-to-train. In our case, we would have been much better off if that entry level employee never darkened our door. Even being a person short for a year and a half would have been better than what we've experienced.
I got rejected from one almost definite job because I didn't know Tolerance Stackups. An Aerotek recruiter call me for an Aerospace Proe Designer job, but I didn't know Tolerance Stackups... I told them they could teach me that, but then he dismissed me for the job just for that. I also did interview at Abbott Labs for a $43/hr Mech Eng job, I felt I didn't quality without Medical Design experience, but in the interview the Boss asked me did I know Tolerance Stackups. I said no, I didn't know it, - can they teach me it?
So after being rejected for a few jobs, just for not knowing Tolerance Stackups, I decided to read a good book about it and be autodidactic. Because they never taught me this in Mech Eng school. And then in 3 days of reading I knew about Tolerance Stackups --> Worst Case Tolerance Analysis, Assembly Shift Analysis, and Statistical Tolerance Analysis. And then it hit me -- a Mech Eng working at the company that could hire me could teach me Tolerance Analysis in a 1 hr example from his previous work, or show me his previous work of his Tolerance Analysis, - then I'd learn it in a snap.
So that's just big BS... You have to know some skills they don't teach you in school just to get a job. That's one reason why I'm struggling as a Product Design Engineer - I wasn't given the gift of employment in a company, and then they would train me on Electronic Packaging Design or Medical Product Design... - They never have those type of design courses in any ME school.
Supply and demand.
They can easily find a candidate that doesn't need training.
Why should a company invest time, effort and money in training someone after they have already trained more than one for specific positions and that employee immediately leaves the company to chase the money.
A prospective employee should already have the training that they pay for themselves since they are trying to convince the prospective company that they are the best fit for the job.
As a business owner I will show you how I want things done but I will not train you how to use the tools needed to get things done properly. You should already know the "how to" before you even apply.
You're selling the employee who is leaving us short, and unfairly. Either that, or you're selling yourself short.
Because my resume has two permanent jobs that didn't last a year. And multiple contract jobs that pepper my resume. I hunger for stability and lasting 5 years at a company at a good enough wage.
My last company, the two Project Engineers I worked under in the Lunar Lander Project - they took me off the Project because I didn't know how to specify weld bead sizes for welds. I didn't find the formula on Google, and when I asked them to TEACH ME THE FORMULA they didn't have an answer. Stupid jerks cost me that job because of that. I needed a break and I didn't get one.
The job we were transitioning from the mid-level employee to the entry level employee? Software development to support data warehousing for data in a proprietary data management system (rather than a normalized RDBMS).
The job we were transitioning from the mid-level employee to the entry level employee? Software development to support data warehousing for data in a proprietary data management system (rather than a normalized RDBMS).
Then if the trained entry level employee was worth it you guys should have offered him a higher salary to counteroffer the job move he did. Then you would have kept his training.
Then if the trained entry level employee was worth it you guys should have offered him a higher salary to counteroffer the job move he did.
It would be great if it was that easy. It is important for you to see the employers side of this. The explanation necessarily starts with a little history.
I was a manager in the 1990s. That was a period of time when the labor marketplace was a sellers' market - an "employees' market": Lots and lots of jobs; very few people looking for jobs. Many employers started offering compensation far in excess of what they were offering previous. It made some sense: You need workers, and there aren't many looking for work, so try to get some folks already settled in jobs to jump to your crew by attracting them with money. It sounds great, right? And I assure you - from personal experience as an employee - it was great for employees.
The problem is, the candidate's original employer will counter-offer to try to keep what they've invested in. And the new employer would offer even more. And so on. There was always a limit, but the process itself had an incremental affect on the marketplace itself, substantially elevating the cost of labor to employers over the years. (This was just before companies started going abroad on a wholesale basis to make up for their weaker bargaining position in the "employee's market".)
The experience is still fresh in the minds of today's managers, many of them realizing quite well how they very successfully exploited the "employee's market" back in the 1990s to their own benefit and, in the long run, to the detriment of the business that their managers back then had to manage. That's why they're gun-shy about starting up another "price war" in the labor marketplace.
There is another reason why companies aren't doing as you suggest. Big companies and small companies majority-owned by big companies now treat their operations more like investment portfolios. Every dollar spent must compete with every other way the company can spend that dollar. And, increasingly, spending the dollar on keeping an American employee is competing with moving the work to some other country. Or, as I'll get into later, just trying to exploit the remaining employees a bit more.
There is a third reason why what you suggested isn't happening: cost containment. After the war, growth became the overarching goal of American business for many companies. The product was the thing. The product people called the shots and the product people got their way. Then things changed. The customer became the thing. The customer surrogates had the power to make things happen and keep things from happening. Companies started believing that "Quality is Free". Well, that nonsense was thoroughly discredited when one of the first winners of the national quality award went belly up due to excessive cost. So the bean counters have retaken control. They actually were in command before the product people took over - before growth was the goal, the goal was simply profit, and that was simply revenue minus expense, bean counter territory. Cost containment is now at the very top of the executive hierarchy.
Part of that ethic is the belief in the power of obstinance: Keep a lid on costs by imposing a budget which may or may not have any relationship to how much it actually will cost to do the work that needs to be done (or perhaps deliberately and consistently a little less than is reasonably appropriate for that amount of work). We see evidence of this tactic all over the working world, with people readily acknowledging that downsizing has resulted in them doing the same work that used to be done by two employees a generation ago, even for positions that haven't had the work automated. For jobs where automation has been introduced, we routinely see one person where previous ten or twenty or more would have been, and time and motion studies would confirm that that one person is do far more operations than the most comparable employee did a generation ago.
So cost containment is at the top of the heap now. Managers may even admit that incurring more resources are necessary to actually accomplish what needs to be done with a reasonable amount of effort by each employee, but still insist that what needs to be done still must be done, and done well, with fewer resources, anyway. "Or else." That's very effective. And even if it is not, there are myriad ways to transfer the responsibility of failure onto others (or just hope that things change enough in the future that by the time failure occurs, someone else is left holding the bag), while, for a manager, there is no way to transfer the responsibility for cost overrun.
Welcome to the world of work. I'm sure glad that I'm in the second half of my career rather than the first half, because things suck so much worse for employees now than when I got started.
Plenty of the jobs listed are jokes and companies demand "purple squirrel" candidates that probably don't exist vs. just training people who could learn the company specific details. I just pulled this nonsense job sent to me from a local recruiter yesterday for a manufacturing engineering position in the area. Tell me at what point the requirements become laughable...
Knowledge and Skills Required:
A. Education
• Bachelor Degree in Engineering from an accredited institution
B. Experience Required:
• Hands on experience in process control
• Hands on experience in an automated manufacturing facility
• Hands on experience with microprocessor based control equipment
• Hands on experience with computer aided design and other software
• High end tile finishing manufacturing (porcelain, granite, etc…)
• Experience with machine shop and woodworking finishing tools
C. Knowledge Required:
• Thorough knowledge of common manufacturing procedure
• Thorough knowledge of drafting practices
• Thorough knowledge of machine shop practices
• Thorough knowledge of statistical problem solving\lean manufacturing tools such as Six Sigma
• Basic engineering knowledge, i.e. strength of materials, heat transfer, dynamics, engineering materials, electrical, physics, etc.
So, some of this makes sense - the degree and related background knowledge, and I guess we'll let them slide on the desire for drafting experience and process control experience. Experience with microprocessor based control equipment is pushing it from what I can tell, but the real prizes are the experience required with high-end tile finishing - I have no idea where they expect to get people with that background, and the experience with machine shop and woodworking finishing tools is also amusing. Sorry, but most manufacturing engineers don't also work on the bandsaw or lathe at the same company.
This is just one random example among countless "jobs" that, because of its narrow requirements, may as well not exist.... unless you're an experienced, well-rounded engineer with a mastery of microprocessor controls and tile finishing who also works on a bandsaw or milling machine in his free time at work.
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