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Where Are America’s Skilled Workers?

shutterstock 145333858
shutterstock 145333858

Nobody is qualified to pilot the jobs that are available in this country. Well, OK, not nobody. But the fact remains that there is a severe skilled-worker shortage in the United States at the present moment. However, take heart because the present administration may be targeting this crisis with the effect of improving it greatly. A new initiative is underway that could aid workers who do not have the skills to qualify for certain jobs, to gain those skills. Through government-sponsored programs and companies’ financial assistance themselves, this crisis’ abolishment might be well in-hand.

6 million

That’s right! More than 6 million jobs currently stand unfilled in the United States. This is due to a simple fact: Nobody can handle them. The skills just aren’t there. And we can’t put unskilled workers into skilled positions. What we can do, however — and what the current administration plans to do — is train workers so that they can help to start ameliorating the nation’s skilled-worker crisis.

President Donald Trump’s new government-training programs are emphasized for their intentions to make workers more job-ready for the current labor climate. In addition to training new workers, a concurrent mission aims to retrain old ones and to fund new, in-house, job-training initiatives. Trump also is retraining workers who never received a degree and plans to expand certain apprenticeship programs as well. An estimated 5 million apprenticeship slots have been pledged for the next five years.

Most are happy

Trump’s new initiative is one of the few to go recognized as a “good move” across socioeconomic and party lines. A total of $150 million has been allotted to funding upcoming apprenticeship programs (specifically those targeting women, people of color, veterans and ex-offenders) by the labor secretary R. Alexander Acosta.

“It isn’t as massive as I’d like to see, but there is a lot of activity going on now at the federal and state levels on apprenticeships and worker training,” Bob Lerman, a fellow at the nonpartisan Urban Institute who studies apprenticeship programs, told the New York Times.

“Forgotten Americans”

The new initiative is meant to underscore Trump’s working-class forgotten Americans pledge (namely, the pledge was to take care of them). “Every day, we are getting our forgotten Americans off the sidelines,” the president said.

It is still unclear just how many jobs will be created by the new initiative (according to the New York Times: “Companies made their commitments in terms of slots — placements in various programs — with Walmart vowing to create a million such opportunities, and a buildings trade union promising another half-million.”) But the momentum is positive, for sure.

When companies were asked to “base their numerical pledges on the number of apprenticeship slots their organization planned to set aside,” the number that two trade association representatives counted totaled 500,000. In the wake of this number, aides to Trump have pledged to include more initiatives such as the retraining of employees for different jobs and the continuation of education programs. Apparently, 500,000 was not a satisfying enough number.

Takeaway

Job training to combat the dearth of skilled workers across the nation does not seem to be a partisan issue. It seems to affect people relatively evenly across the board. As such, Trump and the administration, in general, are facing very little in the way of pushback against the latest initiative to try to bring skilled workers to the positions that so desperately need to be filled.

“We are encouraged by the administration’s commitment to ensuring American workers develop the appropriate skills and have access to the training needed for today’s in-demand jobs and the jobs of the future,” said Frederick W. Smith, chairman and chief executive of FedEx, which, according to The New York Times, “committed to 512,000 workforce development slots, including tuition-assistance programs.”

 

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