In a recent report on the June employment report, Philip J. Orlando, chief economist at Federated Investors, Inc. had a provocative vignette on the skills shortage in the current labor market.
In an admitted extreme example, Orlando relates that a “pharmaceutical company in Cleveland interviewed 3,600 candidates for 150 job openings, and they were able to hire only 47 people. They still have 100 jobs that they desperately need to fill, the company said, but they had to reject 99% of the candidates, because they lacked basic reading and math skills.” (Orlando’s Outlook: June’s Jobs report disappointed all around; July 2, 2010).
If this example is extrapolated across the national labor market, it implies that our unemployment situation is as much a matter of training and education as jobs availability. Will these semi-literate workers ever be able to get jobs in the future?
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