On 9/18/14, 3:59 PM, Gunter Hausfrau wrote: > Machinists, for example, are in demand.
I think we're talking about different things. Jerry points out that you need genius machinists to fix the machines, and that's certainly true. A company whose business is fixing machines may have no choice but to hire that genius and keep him or her happy. However, I think that the companies who _use_ the machines (rather than those who _fix_ them), prefer to use the lowest-skilled, easiest-to-replace people possible. And I think that there are more companies like that, and more jobs like that, than there are for genius machinists. I'm also not sure there's a good pathway between the low-skilled, easy-to-replace machinist and Gunter's "in demand" machinist. In my armchair-economist imagination, I'd expect to see a descending curve if you plotted number-of-jobs vs. skill required. But I think what we would see now is the bottom portion of that curve, followed by flatline, followed by a bump of high-skill-required. And the problem is, getting the people on the low-skill side enough education and experience so they can work at the high-skill side. I should also make clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with somebody who wants to muddle along at the shallow end of the pool (although I think that's a precarious spot to linger). And I also don't think there are _no_ highly-skilled machinists (programmers, doctors, whatever). All I'm saying is, economic pressures and companies' rational business decisions seem to be operating to choke out demand for part of the range of worker skill (specifically, the middle part of the range), and the result is poor/limited opportunities for work and advancement for people at the low-skill end who want to move to the high-skill end. Regards, -- Mersenne Law LLP · www.mersenne.com · +1-503-679-1671 - Small Business, Startup and Intellectual Property Law - 9600 S.W. Oak Street · Suite 500 · Tigard, Oregon 97223
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