Question
Has the 'skills gap' been wrong this whole time?
Employers have complained about a skills gap for ~20 years. If it were real, in a halfway competitive market you'd expect either (a) wages to rise sharply in the supposedly under-supplied skills, or (b) firms to train.
Neither has happened consistently. So either:
- The "gap" is rhetorical (it really means "I want better workers at the current wage")
- Firms are systematically irrational about training, but only in this dimension
- The skills genuinely shift so fast that even trained workers don't help
What's the right read? Has anyone seen analysis that distinguishes these?
2 comments
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Cappelli's been making the "skills gap is rhetoric" case for over a decade. His evidence: vacancy duration correlates with wage offered, exactly like a normal labor market. Firms claiming "we can't find workers" are usually advertising 20th-percentile wages for what they describe as 60th-percentile skills.
From inside a 300-person eng org: we say "skills gap" but what we mean is "we don't want to spend the 9 months to train someone." The skills are learnable. The hiring manager doesn't have 9 months on their roadmap. That gap is real — it's just not a workforce gap, it's a training-time-budget gap.