When Woody Morcott was chairman and CEO of the Dana Corporation he wondered why his company wasn’t using all the brains it had. Today he might ask about why we’re not training them.
Many of writers of books and blog posts and articles and speeches about the “War for Talent” and talent development complain that businesses can’t find good people. Well, Peter Cappelli thinks that business might be part of the problem. Here’s a tidbit from his excellent Wall Street Journal article, “Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need.”
“To get America’s job engine revving again, companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation’s education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.”
Cappelli calls this “an inflexibility problem” and offers several possible solutions. Training is an important one.
“Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand.”
Good management training programs aren’t costs, they’re investments. It was the management training program at Enterprise that provided a steady stream of managers and helped that company grow into the largest of car rental companies.
Apprenticeship programs come in many forms, but almost all involve a partnership between companies, educational institutions and, sometimes, government. North Carolina has done a superb job on this. Recently Siemens and Caterpillar chose Charlotte and Winston-Salem for new plants in part because local community colleges teach the skills they need.
One thing seems clear to me. Wringing our hands about the dearth of “qualified” applicants won’t solve the problem. Working to train people so they’re “qualified” probably will.
