Donald and Ivanka Trump are touting their new initiative, an executive order and the Perkins Career and Technical Education bill, that will help America’s industry fill its need for skilled workers.
Neither Mr. nor Ms. Trump are even coming close to filling employers’ unfilled job needs. As I will detail below, America’s industry will handle the skills requirements and a better solution to our unfilled jobs is not new bills, new agencies or new money given to educators. What America needs now is a lot more immigrants.
In a number of my columns, I have suggested that our educational system needs fixing. Pres. Trump’s executive order and the proposed law are not going to do the trick. What America needs is a Clayton Christensen disruptive action. Christensen is the father of disruptive innovation, a professor at Harvard who will speak to your group if you pony up $50,000 to $100,000.
I spent a day with professor Christensen while a group of us were trying to fix healthcare. He is an amazing man and proposed a number of disruptive ways to solve the healthcare dilemma. A few of the ideas we discussed were bundled pricing for procedures like hip replacement, competitive bidding for people’s pharmaceutical needs and eliminating the need for insurance companies for employer-sponsored healthcare programs.
Let’s see if we can come up with a disruptive innovation when it comes to training employees — especially for those 6 million open positions that employers can’t fill due to a lack of employee skills.
According to Training magazine, employers spent $90.6 billion on training while the U.S. spent $620 billion on K-12 education in 2017. I was surprised to find out that there are 40 different federal government programs that train people for work. I remember selling a copier to the Job Corps years ago and I was impressed with its operation. But could I have been hoodwinked and, just maybe, these bureaucratic agencies are not a good use of taxpayers’ money?
The number of people claiming unemployment insurance is at its lowest level in the past 50 years, which means, hypothetically, that workers’ wages will rise. This is a good thing, but it doesn’t answer the question of how we can fill those jobs that require critical skills. How about giving employers incentives in the form of refundable tax credits if they begin training a new worker?
This is a partial solution because there are more job openings than there are people to fill them. According to The Fiscal Times, two-thirds of these jobs do not require a college degree. Our politicians and educators want to pour money into trade and technical schools but if they are honest with themselves, they need to take pity on the taxpayers — the kids and parents who are amassing terrific debt.
I have been trying to figure out what we can do on a local level. Utah’s unemployment rate is below the national level. I have no idea what our Utah employers need in skilled workers or how many jobs there are unfilled. But I think I have a simple solution.
Trump is on a crusade to stop immigrants, legal or illegal, from entering the U.S., so that’s not a solution. What Utah could do is to stop giving away tax incentives to attract new businesses to the state and spend this state money recruiting workers from around America. Employers with urgent needs could submit a job opening request to a new state agency, which would then would go out and recruit people to fill the job. It just might work.
Robert Pembroke is the former chairman and CEO of Pembroke’s Inc. in Salt Lake City.