Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed (bloomberg.com) 496
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report:Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates. After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere. "We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others." Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need. "It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."
Or they offer too little (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:5, Insightful)
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these are the folks that would say Kernighan and Ritchie are unqualified to do C code.
for anything like an H1B visa there should be an audit of the requirements to check for "loading" and lack of reality
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:5, Insightful)
Visible outcomes:
Invisible outcomes:
The only way to see the invisible outcomes is to test HR by sending in a few eminently qualified resumes and fake (but talented) people to do interviews. Almost nobody does this, so HR lives in a bubble where only the visible outcomes matter. That means their strategy is to eliminate unqualified candidates at all costs, even if it means you also eliminate some qualified candidates. So if HR is supposed to fill a job which requires 2 years experience in a new technology, play it safe and ask for 5 years experience in that tech in the job listing. It doesn't matter that their shoddy listing eliminates all honest applicants competent in the technology. As long as the dishonest applicant they eventually hire is also competent in the technology, HR can only be commended.
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's an interesting anecdotal evidence that confirms your point.
My team has an opening for a Business Intelligence person. HR provided us with 4 candidates. Three of them were below our expectations and one was way above (both by target salary and skillset, not surprisingly). My manager went back to HR and asked for another batch of candidates, and HR "found" another candidate which was almost perfect but was "overlooked" in the first batch. HR lied by saying the candidate only applied during round two, which the candidate proved it wasn't so by showing the job application date.
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I see this complaint, but never see the actual listings by real companies any more. Yes it happened a lot at the end of the tech bubble, but is it still a real thing?
And most ridiculous job ads are basically describing an existing employee, so they can say they posted a public ad, but hire internally. As crazy as these get, I still do not see the impossible ones you describe.
Urban legend status?
Read the article ... (Score:4, Informative)
From the (Bloomberg) article: "From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe".
Yea, right. Mathematical modelers are always thin on the ground and software developers can be, depending on what you ask. Geriatric nurses are an impopular specialisation, and demand is growing fairly quickly. Working conditions tend not to be the best though, so it's not the most popular specialisation. Takes a year and a half to qualify though, and not many hospitals are willing to pay you to do it. Those that are pay you a pittance, fire you the day you graduate, and start with the next bunch of trainees.
Problem is: can you trust current industry demand to guide your choice of curriculum?
Answer: No you can't. Companies (with the exception of the likes of Shell, IBM, GM, Unilever etc.) don't plan any further ahead than 6 months. Easier and cheaper that way. So, current industry demand isn't a very good indicator.
And this: "Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in "Agile" project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Salary's pretty good, especially for Europe. But "trained in agile". Does that mean "attended a few lectures in scrum or whatever"? No. From the rest of the article: you need to have sufficient experience to know what software development is and what the issues are. And then the article lets it transpire that you'll be talking with senior management ... on your project. Sounds like a "development lead with experience in agile" position to me. Definitely not for your average coder, with or without course in "agile" development bolted on.
I can only conclude that the Slashdot headline is a bit misleading. The Bloomberg headline is more accurate, and the article goes on to lambast the Spanish educational system for not paying sufficient attention to industry needs (STEM subjects).
However ... about a year and a half ago I made the acquaintance of a (very smart) Spanish PhD in experimental physics who (1) couldn't find a fitting job opportunity in Spain when she graduated (6 years ago) (2) went abroad to do a doctorate (3) was subsequently unable to find a faculty position (two years ago) in Europe) and went to work as a data analyst for the government.
Several interesting things in this story: she couldn't find a decent job even though she was smart, motivated, and well-educated, she had to look outside Spain to do a PhD (well, some would call that a valuable education in itself), then couldn't find a job in the field for which she had just qualified (experimental physics), and went to do work for which she wasn't "formally" qualified but for which she was quite well prepared (kudos to that HR department).
Now think of your average HR department. Would they have hired her as a data analist? Nah ... too many boxes not ticked. No Hadoop experience, no Java programming certificates, no certificate in SAS, not SPLUNK certified, no Python programming certificates, no Linux certificates (although she did her PhD work on Linux systems like all physicists). Yup. Probably no MS Office certificates either (but perhaps those can be overlooked).
So it's a sum of circumstances: insufficient attention to trivial but "in-demand" qualifications on part of educational authorities to please box-ticking HR departments, HR departments being generally unable to bring any understanding and intelligence to their job (costs too much to have somebody working there who actually understand what the job entails, right ... so keep with the box-tickers). industry as a whole being unable to provide reliable forecasts of future personnel demands.
Re:Or they offer too little *TFA says no* (Score:2)
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"Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in âoeAgileâ project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Pimentel is a fucking sociopathic moron.
No, I mean it. That's all that needs to be said.
But in reality, he was *not* a) offering 200 grands for a suitable candidate and b) he wouldn't know a suitable
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't want to pay for training either. Used to be many people were taught their trade by their employer, but now they expect the cost to be covered by the government and the employee.
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I agree. Employers are trying to have it both ways here. It's reasonable to expect employees to provide their own training if you're paying enough that they'll be attracted to the field and come out ahead in the long run. It's also reasonable to pay less and provide training for your employees.
What businesses are trying to do is get someone else (either the government or the employees themselves) to pay for training without raising wages enough to compensate. "We can't find enough skilled workers" arti
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:4, Interesting)
"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"
You would think so, but no.
That is more of an American thing I think.
I am an American expat living in Germany. I was recently offered a job in Spain for a lot of money. Much more than I make in Germany. I don't speak a single word of Spanish. Poor German and English only.
I actually thought about it, but at the end of the day, it's Spain. Great to visit, but not to live.
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What he isn't telling is the vast migrations of skilled tech workers in Southern Europe to places like the UK or the US where they earn triple or five times the salary for the same work.
The people left either have families (won't change jobs easily), are middle aged (often discriminated against in job ads) or are unskilled. Unskilled and unemployable.
Re:Or they offer too little (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like you are acknowledging that the welfare state causes unemployment.
only in that is allows workers to say no to unreasonable employer demands.
20 lines of... (Score:2)
You figure the Spanish headhunters were getting that 20-line shell script from Argentina, do you?
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Ok serious question, why wouldn't you just hire someone with clearance with enough knowledge to be trainable. Either by current employees or by contracted (who wouldn't need the same clearance). I'm certain that wasn't realistic but I'd like to know why.
I know for a fact that 40 years ago large companies had internal training programs. Someone close to me who is now retired but had a long career in programing was hired by TWA as his first job. He was hired because he was smart and responsible but he had nev
Being "that guy" (Score:5, Interesting)
I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.
In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.
As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.
WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.
I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.
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"I once hired for a job that required a security clearance and some deep TCP/IP packet skills. In a year I found -zero- qualified applicants"
You talk about "deep TCP/IP packet skills" as if it was some kind of arcane only the maesters of Antigua can deal with or something like that. Hint: any promisory IT freshman can do that.
So you lost a year worth of opportunity costs because you'd better not train anyone. And somehow that's the "talent pool" fault.
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Here is an idea, why not make all Government workers 2 month positions. How many of the leaches currently holding office would do so without any financial security? None, asshole.
If only you knew...
Here in Spain a government worker cannot be fired. Ever.
Pass the entrance exams when you're 20 and you can literally do fuck all, all day long, and you'll still get a paycheck every week for life. Plus Christmas bonus (an extra months wages in December - to get you through the holiday season). Plus a pension.
Right now: All those 5 million in Spain are queuing up for government jobs, not looking at whatever this idiot is offering them.
Between the functionaries doing nothing and the politic
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Abusive government (Score:2, Informative)
The issue is crystal clear and was to be expected. The government decided to allow the employers to treat employees like garbage, and they did because they could find someone else easily. However anyone with proper skills and education can easily be employed in countries like Germany and the Netherlands due to the EU. Close to a million Spanish people left the country since the crisis.
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How is that a problem?
Labor markets are working...cheer!
Now Spain will raise pay for skilled labor and some will come back, again, how is this a problem?
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Now Spain will raise pay for skilled labor
Not going to happen, the companies will just pressure the government to allow more foreign workers who will work for less (or hire subcontractors who already do.) Same thing has been happening in the US for years.
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What's the average pay for American engineers in fantasy land?
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My experience in Germany is similar. I'm currently looking for a new job, and based on the (sparse) feedback I get from potential employers the €55k/year I'm asking for are a realistic market value.
This is only marginally more than what one could expect ten years ago. Counting inflation, low as it is, this amounts to a decline in purchasing power.
The likely reason in case of Germany is that the trade associations have successfully lobbied our politicians to allow more immigration of qualified people fr
Re:Abusive government (Score:5, Interesting)
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
Absolutely. Not everyone is capable of doing every job, no matter how much training you give them. Even of those who can be trained, some are going to be a lot better than others. This has a lot of consequences, because the low-skilled but high-paying jobs of the old days are vanishing at an increasing rate, and they're not coming back. When we put 3 million professional truck/etc drivers out of work, we can't just stick them all in a web development class and call it even. At some point - maybe not today, but eventually the day will come, where we have to entirely rethink our employment paradigm, institute a minimum basic income or the like, and accept that not everyone will be directly employed the way they used to be.
Re:Abusive government (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mod this guy up. Seriously. The average IQ is 100. Half the population is below that. Humans, by and large, are not sufficiently intelligent to do the jobs that are out there, and robots can do the jobs they are qualified for, and a whole lot more, i.e.: Robots can be lawyers and physicians as easily as fry cooks.
We need smarter people, but half the population only knows how to make more low-IQ humans. It's one thing to say everyone deserves life and all human life has value and all those nice words, but qu
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Well, I have a modest proposal...
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his policy of driving down wages (Score:5, Informative)
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Once you hire somebody in Spain you can't fire them, it is extremely difficult to get rid of an employee, the government has protected the people from having jobs, thus huge unemployment and disinterest from hiring and training.
This is complete nonsense. Based on this premise (or so they said) the laws were actually changed around 2011 or so, and the only result was that the companies fired long-term employees, because it was cheaper now, and they replaced them with workers in temporal contract with lower wages. When firing someone was made easier simply went up, and the wages went down.
I hire and train people in my business but I can only do it because I can easily get rid of them. In fact I don't even pay them during the first few weeks of training and if they are unable to learn and cannot show potential I get rid of them.
Essentially you want people to work for free some time and after a few weeks you can tell them they have no potential and "hire" the next trainee
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I would never let anybody come close to touching my codebase without them training in my company on a standard set of test projects for a few weeks, which is the training they are receiving. The test projects are the same ones for everybody, they start with a completely empty machine, installation of the OS and of all systems and software, compiling the db, doing a bunch of training with he os first, building the same test applications that everybody else working for me already built, learning the concepts
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"I would never let anybody come close to touching my codebase without them training in my company on a standard set of test projects for a few weeks"
So you have them training on your own particular ways, for you own particular benefit but still you won't pay them for their time.
I have a name for you, but I'm too polite to write it down here.
"As to Spain, you have no idea how difficult and expensive it is to hire and fire people there"
Neither do you.
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"I know quite a bit. You have never hired anybody, to you everything seems simple."
Except, of course, I've hired people and I of course know what hiring costs (and firing costs) are here in Spain.
"It is extremely expensive to hire there (in Spain) and to fire is also extremely expensive."
You keep using vague words on your statements. Can you please tell us exactly how much it takes to hire someone, let's say on a mid-management position, and how much does it take to fire him -either with founded cause or w
Wrong Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem isn't that workers lack the skills needed. It's the fact that the companies are looking for the perfect candidates. They have no interest in training people to do the job. When entry level programming positions require compsci degrees and 3 years experience in 5 different languages/libs you know the barrier to entry is a bit too high...
Of course, part of the problem is the employees themselves. The company trains them then poof. The employee runs off to a different job that pays more. No loyalty to the hands that taught you how to fish.
Re:Wrong Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
No loyalty to the hands that taught you how to fish.
companies get as much loyalty as they give.
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You only train when it is to your advantage to do so. This requires a payback financially, which comes from a balance of retention, lower wages, or network effects of not being able to operate otherwise.
If a new grad expects $65k and an experienced person for the same role expects $75k, the training barrier can be a huge hurdle. For my company, we need about a 20% discount and strong long-term prospects to justify hiring inexperienced people. If the long-term prospects aren't there, we pay a little over
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Re: Wrong Problem (Score:2)
Perfect is googled and not known. Most companies have no idea what they need. The people involved either google it or give it to a hiring agency that has templates based on historic googling.
If companies wanted the "perfect" fit, they would cut their position requirements by easily 75%. But because of the crap ecosystem they helped develop, they would get every retard with a smile that needs someone to actually spend time vetting. So they pump up the reqs and get someone with worse skills but was able to co
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Says more about your jobs than anything else. Are you surprised that jobs requiring 'little for skills' pays 'little'?
Re: Wrong Problem (Score:2)
I work for a really big global company. I deal with people in development, design, engineering, sales, various vendors, acct, finance, procurement, management, facilities, etc. Before this I consulted at various clients.
Looking at almost every position where my personality matched or was close enough for; I have rarely come across one that I felt I couldn't get proficient at in 1-2 months. Sales, management, procurement and heavy machinery have been the only areas so far that I was pretty sure I would nee
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So impossible without a 'drive to learn'. That lets out 99.9% of the adult population and 100% of the whiners.
You expect 100% of the adult population to still be capable of learning independently? At least 25% were never capable of learning when spoon fed.
You made your bed. (Score:5, Informative)
Too much globalism (Score:3)
To put things in perspective, consider some numbers:
Spain's population is about 47 million
Spain's labor force is about half that (23 million)
The "5 million unemployed" represents more than 20% of the workforce.
If a headhunter can't find people in the country and has to import, my question is this: is globalism bad for Spain?
Globalism is taught as the one-true-religion in economics circles right now, but I'm wondering if this is a dodge. While globalism has made a handful of companies richer, it drives the p
A Parable (Score:2, Interesting)
Originally, you were good at a few things, but you had a sizable interest in other topics as well. Perhaps you have a film industry, a steel industry, a car industry, and a farm industry that produces the world's best avocados. You're proud of all of these, and so are your people, even when you're not the best.
But now you're global, with little to no trade barriers, and the only thing the world wants from you are avocados. As a global country, the flourishes of your nation that made you interesting, unique,
Free to move - how free is that? (Score:4, Insightful)
So how easy is it, do you think, to pick up and move yourself (and possibly your family) from here to there, when you have only the dole as income, if that?
"Free to move" is only a valid statement if you have money to move with, not to mention a place to go where you will immediately find employment to pay your bills.
Which is to say, it's not usually a valid statement at all.
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"In the EU the only barrier to finding a room for rent is (maybe) language."
Yes, sure: the only barrier.
What about the money to pay the rent with?
Rationalization of globalism (Score:3)
Sadly
Its not that easy to move around, if you are young and with no commitments is somewhat easier, but if you have a family, mortgage to pay, and been working for years in a factory, going to another country where they speak a different language and with little money in the bank, leaving your family ties and friends back is a very difficult proposition, the only way i could see people in that situation to move to another country would be if they were in a situation like Iraq
The OP also assumes that there are jobs in other EU countries he could get.
By and large, if you're in an industrialized country you find your jobs are taken by immigrants from a pastoral country, but be unable to find equivalent jobs in those other countries.
To take a specific example, one slashdot commentator [slashdot.org] noted the tech workers at a cancer testing facility in the UK were Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, and Greek.
How likely would it be for a qualified UK worker to find a job in Greece, Poland,
So what has to change? (Score:2)
Protectionism doesn't work. The world is competing now, and running away to avoid that just makes you into East Germany, and the Berlin wall is falling.
Protectionism doesn't work because of rationalization.
Globalism doesn't work because of evidence.
But I'll give you a chance to explain. What changes should we make to prevent the American people from being driven into poverty [cnn.com]?
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And then there are employers who only want to hire perfect candidates, even if there are a bunch of people with reasonably close skill sets, willing to work and asking for reasonable wages.
There are quite a few shades of grey between "trained" and "untrained", and often a candidate with related experience could bridge the gap with a bit of training on the job. I suspect Samuel Pimentel (or his client) has unrealistic expectations and is blaming everyone but his own lack of flexibility.
Investment vs Commodity? (Score:2)
If you invest in someone, you see what they can become, and you take the risk to train them. Five years ago I was one of these people, and though I had the foundation that my employer could build on, I didn't even know there was a job like mine in the workforce. I even told them as much, and they hired me anyway, because they believed I could learn and become an asset. So far, it seems that I have. Actually, the situation was even more beautiful than that, because no one really knew what to do at first, jus
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Lack of Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.
they want H1B's like workers who are tied to the j (Score:3)
they want H1B's like workers who are tied to the job and are willing to do what it takes even if means 60-80 hour weeks / not standing up for your rights.
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Yes and no. If a company literally cannot find anyone qualified to do a job, then they have no one qualified to teach someone to do that job either.
Also, the global market is competitive, probably way to competitive to allow for companies to hire redundant employees whose main job is to train for possible future job openings. Presumably if there was already exists lower level positions who could be promoted into these unfillable positions, possibly after a few weekend courses, then they would of done that.
Re:Lack of Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
I think we're going to see more and more of that tension in a lot of places. The reality in the world is that for most jobs, "on the job education" is the most effective. We've created a system that tells young people to go to college, but traditional universities were never really designed for job training. That happens at technical schools. At a higher level where theory is required in addition to practice, it can happen at a "professional school," like med school, which tends to combine some theoretical coursework with apprenticeships (i.e., clinical training, often at a teaching hospital).
We're seeing a greater and greater problem for college graduates finding jobs, because they don't have practical skills that one will generally learn on the job over the course of several months or a few years. And it's also very inefficient because the theoretical material students learn in a college classroom is often forgotten quickly without practical reinforcement, forcing graduates to relearn the material needed on a daily basis when they finally find a job (rather than integrating it into more permanent and practical knowledge as they go). College was designed to be "higher education," not job training -- it was meant to expose students to a wide variety of ideas and disciplines, not teach only the specific skills for a job. It makes no sense to segregate theoretical and practical training if you actually want students to learn skills for a job.
If employers really wanted better (and more loyal) workers, they should stop just requiring a degree before getting a job and instead help train workers on the job, perhaps partnering with a higher-ed program to provide a bit of theoretical instruction as necessary to complement the work.
Why aren't they doing this?....
"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.
Sort of. But I suspect this is primarily being driven by a desire to have lower-cost employees. A few decades ago, companies were mostly limited to whomever they could find locally. It was really expensive to look beyond the local labor market, let alone internationally, so it was mostly done only for major jobs in the company.
Nowadays, it's so much easier and faster to just find someone on the other side of the planet who has most of the skills already and is willing to work for a fraction of the cost of a local worker.
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The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
And let the employee get snatched up by some other company once trained? That's a losing strategy.
Proof the EU is Working (Score:5, Interesting)
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country. Just the same happening but at an international level.
Re:Proof the EU is Working (Score:5, Insightful)
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country
This is, in essence, why the rest of the UK voted to leave the EU and take London down with it. The EU counterweight to the free movement of people and capital is regional development which is supposed to have a redistributive effect and even out the gains and losses. I'm afraid the hollowing-out of talent from many regions and countries of the EU is proof precisesly that the EU is not working as intended.
Re:Proof the EU is Working (Score:5, Interesting)
You forgot to mention the billions of Euro that the EU spends on aid payments to support specifically the structurally weak areas of Europe - including Spain.
If Spain wasn't in the EU, their clever youth would still leave the country for a better career abroad - but Spain wouldn't get anything back.
Or do you think that in a nationalist euphoria, spanish youngsters would suddenly decide to stay in their sucking local job market if Spain left the EU?
BTW: A colleague of mine relocated from Germany to Spain (for the warmer weather). He still works for the same German company - just remotely. So he at least supports the spanish economy by buying stuff where he now lives. If Spain wasn't in the EU, such a relocation might have been too cumbersome to do it just for the sake of warmer weather.
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Create the Workers You Need (Score:3)
A lot of industries here in the U.S. are facing a similar situation: there's work they'd like to do, but its using skills that either haven't been in high demand in the past or haven't existed before. The only real solution is to create the workers with the skills that you need, but this is both expensive and generally outside of the scope of what the business is capable of doing. Training programmers, for instance, is a very different business than making industrial control systems.
We're taking a proposal to some of our clients to set up these kinds of training programs for them. But it's not a sure thing that they'll be willing to make this investment, because it's going to mean changes in the way they do business as well.
Lemme guess, they gave big tax breaks to (Score:3)
corporations who threatened to take their offices/factories elsewhere, defunding the schools, so now they have a shortage of qualified workers and they have to import them. I wonder if they have anything similar to an H1B visa program...
We need more info about the unemployed (Score:2)
Sounds like the same BS we deal with in the US (Score:3)
Have the employers these workers aren't qualified enough for tried raising salaries or paying to train people?
It sounds exactly like what we older workers deal with in the US. Once we start making 'too much," we're targeted for elimination because someone with no family or responsibilities can be employed much cheaper. I know it's very possible to let one's skills atrophy, or do the same job for 20+ years, but I don't do any of those and get lumped in with the "too old" crowd. As a result, I never get responses from a cold call resume submission -- most of my jobs recently have been found because people know me.
As for "not qualified," no one is a 100% drop-in replacement. Not even the Infosys, Tata or Wipro guys they send in...which is also part of the problem. Companies don't train people anymore, and expect them to be immediately productive on the first day. A generation before I graduated, large and even medium employers had extensive training programs for new hires. It was possible for someone motivated to come in out of high school. or you could graduate with a generic degree. As long as the new hire was motivated and trainable it didn't matter.
So yes, I think Spain is starting to get a taste of how the tech employment market is for US workers. I feel the current visa system in the US needs to be reformed (not eliminated) to allow for the domestic workforce to grow. No one with a modicum of sense is going to go into engineering, computer science or other STEM fields if they are destined to be the new humanities degrees in terms of employment success/ROI. Once people see a future in these fields, they'll study them again.
Retraining unemployed youngsters into Dive Masters (Score:2)
Only offering $220,000/year for Agile devs (Score:2)
"Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
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Every nation has a group of workers who will never be much good at anything more complicated than slopping paint on walls.
About 25%.
Denial isn't going to do anything for them. They just need jobs digging ditches.
Re:internal training (Score:5, Interesting)
There's several EU countries that have young adult unemployment rates at, near or above 50% now. Seems to me that there's a more serious problem then simply that. Either they don't want to hire people and train them for the jobs, they have requirements for jobs that are stupid or they're shitcanning people who could have been retrained and kept within the company.
Re:internal training (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe they have laws that once you hire someone you're stuck with them for years. Hence nobody hires unless they know the person is already skilled.
Re:internal training (Score:4, Informative)
This. Socialism leads to high unemployment. You can argue about why, about how everyone is doing socialism wrong, about how this is no true socialism, whatever, but what the EU nations do right now creates high unemployment. And the problem worsens over time.
Re: internal training (Score:2, Interesting)
A quick Google search shows the US unemployment rate in 2015 was 5.5%, with the UK showing an unemployment rate of 5.4% for the same year. Why don't those evil, socialist, employee protections cause massive unemployment in the UK, I wonder?
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Work 50-60 hours/week in Spain? Who?
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40 years is fast for going from Fascism to Capitalism. Good on spain. They just have to make sure they don't backslide back to socialism.
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The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
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I don't understand the, "If it is not a guaranteed long term position, then it's worthless" attitude.
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Re: higher skill required = less people to do it (Score:4, Informative)
Having come from two small villages... Bullshit.
Most villages are labor intensive, low mental req, and low profit systems. People share the work because there is too much of one thing to do in the window it must be done. You start working with the sun up (meaning you get ready well before), rest when high, and return home when down (you wash, eat, and sleep quickly). And every day of every season there is a natural schedule that must be followed else you will fall behind.
In most places, most of the family works and contributes in one way or other. You have your upper, middle, and lower classes. Only the upper and middle can afford education.
In return for all this, you are in the upper class if you can afford the middle class equivalents of 1st world countries. You look at any well developing country and one of the first things you see is the lack of youth in villages... Because they all left for the cities.
Yes, a village is a nice relaxing, low stress environment... Mentally. And if you already have the monies, physically too. If you visit a village and see people sitting around... These are the well off rich people. There 4-6 people for each that they are paying daily who work from sun up to sun down.
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Re:So Slashdot is a blatant propaganda peddler now (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.
Re: So Slashdot is a blatant propaganda peddler no (Score:3)
Forcing labor intensive manufacturing to on-shore won't magically create a domestic blue collar workforce.
Say a company has a widget that costs a dollar to be manufactured in China and shipped to the US. That same widget if manufactured in the US today costs two dollars.
Adding tariffs such that the Chinese price would equal or exceed the domestic manufacturing cost would in theory incentivize domestic production. What it would do in reality is incentivize investments in automation to reduce the domestic pro
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could we get more anecdotal evidence?
I quintupled my starting salary through job shopping.
Who needs. or even wants, job security when you can retire before having to worry about age discrimination?
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There is no water in California so, nothing's in the water. I read it as sarcasm.
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