George Rebane

In the 24oct11 WSJ, Wharton School academic Peter Cappelli posits that employers are putting too much blame on schools for not turning out educated workers who can do the available jobs (here).  Employers should instead take in the unqualified, and educate them in the skills needed as, he claims, they did in the old days.  This is another example of an inexperienced liberal academic spouting wisdom from his ivory tower.  As a worker in and manager of businesses over the last half century, I assure you that the world he imagines did not exist.  The limited OJT (on the job training) programs implemented then were possible because the minimum wage and hiring/firing situation was much more fluid and conducive to dealing with young promising workers – if they didn’t work out, they were shown the door with no chance of recourse.

And his claim that you didn’t have to know the job when hired is simply bovine scat.  Then as now, rapid productivity was the name of the game industry wide; things you were taught were only company-specific practices.  With some high school drafting under my belt, at 19 while Eisenhower was still President, I was hired as an entry level draftsman by Genge Corporation and sent to a big aerospace company in Glendale.  We were put on drafting boards located in trailers with no A/C, given small engineering rework tasks to draw up, and watched like a hawk.  If you didn’t cut it, you were out by noon.  Next case please.  (Fortunately I made it and quickly became a senior design draftsman to pay for my undergraduate schooling.)

The same happened when I walked into my first job as an electronics engineer while still completing my BS.  I was shown my desk, my bench space in the circuit design lab, and given the specifications for a device that had yet to be invented, let alone designed and built.  My job was simply to do it.  Period.  (Four months later I delivered the first synchro-to-digital converter.)

In both cases, you learned on your own time anything needed that you didn’t already know.  That’s why God invented midnight oil.  And I want to emphasize that my experience was nothing special or extraordinary.  Over the years my peers and I shared our war stories, and they were all the same.  And it never stopped – twenty years later I was hired to turn around an electronics manufacturing company with a unionized factory ready to go on strike.  As an established systems scientist I had never run a complex hardware (educational electronics) company.  The choice again was ‘learn or burn’.  In short, at all levels, from snot-nosed draftsman to corporate CEO, we all had to lay down a thick track of rubber when our wheels hit the pavement, else it was the door.

Today we have the ‘self-esteem’ generation still entering the workforce with degrees in gender studies, environmental assessment, and the like.  Alongside these aspirants, apologists like Professor Peter Cappelli, who admits to no private sector business experience, study the employment situation and conclude that corporations fighting for survival during a humungus recession (proceeding to depression) should hire and train as permanent employees the unqualified applicants whom the law no longer allows the employer to properly vet, who must be paid an unseemly and unearned minimum wage, and who cannot be easily discharged.  The government has made hiring and employment an expensive minefield of regulations and risk.  It is no wonder to any but the progressive mind that today businesses are hiring slowly if at all, and taking the extra time to employ only the best people they can find.