That is incorrect. Name combined with any number of those other pieces of information is what makes the record sensitive. The pieces by themselves is not considered sensitive.

What's wrong with name, address, phone number, account number, invoice number, PO number, support record number or the like?

If they have none of those, you really have no business pulling up the account for them. If they do have them, you don't need the index on the sensitive information.

Simple solution. Encrypt the sensitive information before storing it in the database. Leave all of the other information unencrypted. You don't need to search by the sensitive fields anyway, so the inability to index them doesn't matter.

Use filesystem/os level support for locking down the key on the system that needs to be able to decrypt it so that only the account/application authorized to access it can. That limits the vulnerabilities a single system. Even once on that system it is limited to "root" and the actual application.

Now you may safely let any number of insecure systems query your database. You can use trivial database backup schemes with no additional encryption. You don't need to worry about the physical security of those backups. Since you only need to backup the key when you first generate it, there is never any danger of the key and backup data being lost together in transit.

There is no speed penalty anywhere in the system except the sensitive parts.

Companies outsource the entry level positions and only direct hire senior level positions.

The problem is that without the junior level positions, you'll not increase the number of senior level workers. As technology changes, new senior level positions are created and the existing senior level people move to it. So now you have the same senior level people filling both the old jobs and the new jobs but no new senior level people being created.

No company wants to do the training, because it costs them a lot of money. They don't even save money when the employee is more experienced since they have to give them significant raises to keep them from going elsewhere. Every company thinks they can save on training by hiring away these people, but since nobody is willing to train them in the first place, they just don't exist.

Lack of qualified workers? That just means that the company is trying to skimp on training.