Productive work and non-productive work largely pay the same. Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning almost exactly the same wage but doing nothing that is productive in itself.
The only place I have found this not to be true is in finance, where there is a clear incentive to reduce operational costs in order to increase the bonus pool. In engineering, tech, healthcare (almost everywhere in local govt), actually acquiring skills is pointless (if you are able to nepo your way into a management role).
That is how you end up with large numbers of over-qualified people simultaneous with low productivity. All the subsidies and incentives for firms to train staff make no difference, we have all the skills we need but the price of those skills is very low.
The problem is management competence. Most managers are also unskilled, even managers with technical skill usually come into management after graduating not after working at a lower level.
This kind of mismanagement happens everywhere but is the rule in the UK. The US is quite far from perfect, but the UK is not even close to this level yet. We are still at the level where the system is not working.
This is almost the same situation in France. Very same issue with management.
Most middle earning jobs don't need hard skills anymore, so most of employees gradually lost them over the time (and not the opposite, like a muscle). The gen-Z is additionnaly often missing the most basic soft skills : basic, social skills, punctuality... or even coming to work at all.
So we are gradually building a generation where about two-thirds of people have... no more or almost no skills whatsoever. Can't change a wheel, can't swap a breaker, can't replace a tap, can't do more than basic IT-assisted tasks in a predefined process. More and more youngs must try hard to get their driver license, and so city dwellers conveniently skip it (but a good thing in the end). To the point that basic maths are a thing of the past for them. Perhaps 10% are currently able to write this very comment. Let's not even talk about financial education at this point, more than 60% fail at giving you the right amount of two years worth of an account interests.
I can witness that even business holders are gradually losing skills at running their own businesses those last two decades. Their skill in the differents subjects they must address all day long are almost all declining, even their core ones. They don't want to make longer work hours anymore than their employees and want to "Netflix and Chill" like everyone else.
Remains about the 20% skilled, but I have the feeling that over the last 20 years their portion is progressively shrinking. Lack of forecast made health pro number dwindle, "true" engineers (mechanical/electrical/civil) are harder and harder to find since a non-negligible part of them leave the country after completing their studies.
Are we going to make Idiocracy a reality sooner that expected ?
I don’t know about the merits of this argument, but it feels like a bit of an old-man ‘back in my day’ argument. A few things I note:
- France has significantly higher productivity per hour than the U.K., but possibly this is due to workers working fewer hours. France has also had (slightly) better productivity growth since the financial crisis
- Is it actually relevant for young people to be able to replace taps or whatever? Cars are more reliable these days so there are fewer forced learning opportunities. If you are young and live in some city apartment, maybe you don’t even drive and maybe you shouldn’t be doing DIY plumbing on a property you don’t own. But these also feel to me like quite arbitrary standards – most young people likely have jobs that don’t require them to know how to change a tap and when you were young, your jobs likely didn’t require you to know how to use the Internet (or whatever – I don’t know how long ago you were starting work).
- If you look at the standardised international measures for things like literacy and numeracy, you’ll likely find that (1) the highest level feels like a pretty low level of ability to you and (2) a percentage of any developed country you pick won’t perform at this level, and you’ll likely find that percentage surprisingly high
- So, maybe there’s also an effect where the older people you interact with have picked up random skills over the years and become more ‘stratified’ such that you are less likely to interact with someone whom you think doesn’t know much but the young people you meet haven’t had so many of these random chances and are a more representative sample of the general population?
I don’t know anything about the situation in France though. Maybe you’re just plain right.
Isn't part of the problem in France the quite rigid educational system? If you don't go to Grande Ecoles then the managerial roles are basically out...but this kind of selects for a lack of practical skills?
The UK is exactly the same btw. One of the changes the current govt is looking at is trying to stop the streamlining of students at 15 into humanities and sciences by making everyone take maths up to 18.
I think the stuff about basic skills is also correct but perhaps orthogonal. Quite agree but it makes us sound like old-school types. I have noticed that younger people don't like using the phone, it is...not good. But I think young people can learn, I worry more about older people preventing their growth.
>The problem is management competence. Most managers are also unskilled, even managers with technical skill usually come into management after graduating not after working at a lower level.
My observation is that in general managers are optimizing the thing that personally benefits them the most: their pay, promotions and careers. The company doing well has rather little impact on that so they don't optimize for that. Promotions for managers either in the same company or at a new company are often based on headcount they managed. So they focus on making the team grow irrespective of value from that. Their bosses are aiming for the same thing so everyone is aligned.
It's not incompetence but a lack of belief that helping the corporation for the sake of helping the corporation is of any value.
I also hear this as a pretty common complaint of companies in the US (including big tech companies). It feels too generic to explain why things are different for the UK
Do you have any evidence to support the statement that this is "the rule in the UK"? Anecdotally (in the UK) I've only ever known managers of technical teams to have risen from technical roles, and have never heard of anyone going straight into technical management from university. I'm not super experienced though so very open to my experience not being the norm, just curious if you were speaking from experience or research.
Yes, you are right. Within IT, that is definitely true...and creates it's own problems because devs (in the UK) often lack business skills..and the alternative is a non-dev who lacks tech skills.
But the example I gave is more prevalent within engineering generally. Engineering grads will hope to either work in banking or go directly into management scheme (GE was the premium one...when GE was big, defence is the other big one). The pay for actual engineering work (outside O&G) is very low, and only attractive because PHd work is even more exploitative.
> Almost all middle-earning but high-productivity jobs will have a legion of support staff earning almost exactly the same wage but doing nothing that is productive in itself.
Gotta be somewhat careful about these kinds of characterizations, though. A lot of support staff may not be doing things that are directly producing profitable output for the company, but they still provide necessary services (and, well, support) that enable the people who are "line workers" to be more, and more consistently, productive.
A great example is IT, especially in a non-tech-oriented company. Without a competent IT department, your workers will struggle every time there's a bug, or the power goes out, or they forget their passwords. And yet, as has been seen all too often, IT is a "cost center". And, indeed, it's not at all uncommon for there to be many incompetent IT people in a given large company, who are exactly the kind of unproductive drag on the business that you describe.
My point, ultimately, is that any attempt to divide employees into "produces value, good for the company" and "unproductive, bad for the company" cannot be done by simple categorization; it requires actually evaluating the individuals' contributions. Which, exactly as you say, far too few managers are actually capable of doing.
I think it is definitely true that finance overuses over-skilled, low-wage workers but my point is that there is also quite a strong incentive to keep a lid on those costs due to the organization distinction between back and front-office work.
Imo, banks are the rare example of an industry that has moved with the times in the UK (largely because many of them, even the British ones, are run and managed by non-UK people). They are far from perfect, but you don't see bankers getting paid the same back-office admin guy...that does happen in engineering though.
A colleague who is non-tech but does light ETL work (this relates to the subject: only in the UK could they fail to hire someone to actually do this work properly) was propounding to me about the benefits of ChatGPT. He could ask it for Python or SQL, and he could just paste it in and it would do all his tasks.
His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them.
In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now.
I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp.
The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.
My experience with ChatGPT is that while it knows more than I do about anything I'm not an expert in, it isn't as good as me in my expertise — a literal jack of all trades and a master of none — so while I would expect it to be better than a junior manager fresh out of management school, and definitely better than someone who shambled into management by accident when they founded a company and needed to grow it, I don't expect it to be as good as even an average manager.
“Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program.
Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud.
It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.
It's nice to imagine, but tech puts its quality gates around developers. That means developers will end up having to prove they are better than a manager-using-ChatGPT, rather than managers having to prove anything.
I just can't take any discussion of "skills" seriously that equates skill to some formal certification or degree.
As a software engineer, basically all the skills I use to do my job on a day to day basis are things I've learned from experience, or informal mentorship from other engineers, or reading blog posts on programming practices and then applying those things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
But to an economist none of this counts. A 24 year old that just started their first job after getting a masters degree in CS is considered objectively more skilled than someone with an undergrad degree and 10 years of experience.
To be fair, technical skills training in the UK is currently mostly delivered through apprenticeships. The model is 80% "on the job", 20% "off the job" training. So, in theory at least, they should deliver the kind of experience and informal mentorship you're talking about, alongside classroom based training (which is supposed to cover fundamentals, theory, etc.).
In practice, how well this works depends on how effectively employer and training provider coordinate, and how committed the employer is to delivering on the mentorship part.
Economists have a habit of abusing data. It's seen as preferable to simplify the system enough to test a hypothesis than to acknowledge that the system is too complex to analyze. A little too much physics influence and not enough engineering.
I would think that software engineering is the exception that proves the rule: people with domain knowledge are highly motivated to share what they know, ask questions, consolidate knowledge, and refine processes using the Internet.
Working in another field (public services might be a good example) it’s often not possible to test out hypothetical solutions, or find relevant expertise, or to even discover that whole areas of knowledge actually exist. In that context, relevant qualifications have a little more weight.
You can go onto youtube and find dozens if not hundreds of people wanting to share their expertise with the world on every subject you could possibly imagine. "Qualifications" are just the result of a lobbying effort from those already in the industry to restrict supply in order to increase the rates they can charge.
> I would think that software engineering is the exception that proves the rule: people with domain knowledge are highly motivated to share what they know, ask questions, consolidate knowledge, and refine processes using the Internet.
Not my experience they don't want these people on the Netherlands not with my skin colour I guess.
For me it's about being given dedicated time and space to actually upskill - sure in house training is (the most?) important, but what about developing new skills that no one in your company already has? Reading blog posts is all well and good as a software engineer but for many roles this is not an option as there might not be high quality content publicly available online.
very much this. i am applying for a workvisa, and they ask me for my degree (which i don't have) because it counts more than the decade+ of work experience running my own business.
This isn't really true. The article talks about apprenticeships. While traditionally apprenticeships in the UK were mostly for blue collar work, these days you can do apprenticeships in almost anything: software engineering, law, medicine, management, etc.
There’s the story of a manager who starts booking expensive training courses for his team, and another manager says, “but what if you spend all this money on training and they take their new qualifications and leave the company?” to which the first manager replies, “and what if we don’t give them any training, they stay low-skilled, and they stay?”
If it's really expensive training then it's not uncommon to mandate that the employee must stay, say, 2 years afterwards or repay the training's cost pro-rata.
In any case, people leave because they are unsatisfied and/or underpaid so if the company has that covered attrition will be low.
If employees have choice for denying this training, then most employees will never be part of this. If not, I think it is morally wrong to force longer stay and I would start looking for another job if I am in this situation.
They might try, but people with useful rare skills can get away with asking for more money during job hunts, and that's not always the case (or at least not so soon) for existing employees.
(I'm hypothesising wildly, this isn't necessarily accurate).
tbh I hate this approach of up-skilling / free trainings, all they are really after with this is squeezing every last bit of juice out of you so they can continue to consolidate job roles and make you do more with less, instead of hiring SME's for specific things, they have a jack of all trades working on an endless amount of items that use to require a team of 10+ people to do. Especially in tech roles.
Software companies in the UK, and companies that employ devs as part of another business, are terrible at recognising the value that their staff represent. It's pretty much universally true across the industry here that you can't really work your way up in a company - progression comes from job hopping and pretty much nothing else. You can do all the training, certifications, and learning you like but it won't substantially change your employers view of you.
It's a bit of a daft situation really. Companies spend far too much on hiring that could be going on wages. My wages specifically. :)
That used to be the standard view of devs in the US as well, but has likely improved somewhat (hopefully) with the rise of Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc.
This was brought home (pun intended?) to me back in 2015 when my wife and I were vetting realtors for the sale of our house. One of the realtors, actually an 'elderly' husband and wife, after being told (by me) that I was a software developer proceeded to share that they had retired from working in HR at a software company and went on with 'oh my, don't you know how crazy and entitled those ridiculous software developers are!'
That wasn't their first misstep, and we went with a different realtor.
No-one got bailed out, that is actually part of the problem in the UK. The US cleverly bailed out key firms, let the really troubled ones fail, and had no disruption to growth from financial disorder after 2010.
The UK acquired the same firms, went full ham on regulation, and there has been massive corporate deleveraging because most banks don't really do corporate lending anymore.
However, any firm that did have existing finance relationships was grandfathered in. Rates fell, and so these old inefficient firms have largely survived hoarding both labour and finance (the UK also has a disproportionate number of very unproductive family-owned firms).
The UK is the textbook case of finding the absolute worst thing to do at the worst time. I wouldn't say the issue is necessarily bailouts but regulators (and particularly the BoE) not understanding that the financial cycle plays a role, that bureaucrats shouldn't be intervening into management decisions by banks, that fiddling the price of money has trade-offs...I agree, but the decision to bailout is a product of beliefs that continued to damage after 2010 (and this was far less the case in the US, the bubble in tech stocks/SPACs/etc. demonstrates that the system is still alive...this didn't happen in the UK).
1) Managers often don't know what skills people lack or how to take them a few steps up using new skills. Usually these are not the core skills people need to do the job. For instance, an accountant could do a decent job, yet only have basic knowledge of excel. The accountant's manager, depending on the complexity and the psce of the company,may or may not be aware of it. Everyone's happy the way it is. However, if the accountant knew Excel better, some tasks would take only half the time, whilst others could be automated and so. This is extremely common in a lot of companies
2) People don't want to upskill. Yes, I'm aware it's a blanket statement, however both as a manager and simply as a colleague, I found this to be the case. Very few,even if they are aware of the problem( e..g. skill shortage) try to address them. I can't count the number of times I told people to at least try to learn x, because their job would become much easier and they'd get more money. Nope, not interested..
Also, actively offering people time and access to learning resources don't seem to help much either.
> I told people to at least try to learn x, because their job would become much easier and they'd get more money. Nope, not interested
How much more money? I'm frankly not sure there is any skill you can learn on your own (without full-time commitment and/or paid formal education) in a reasonable time that would make financial sense for a typical 50k/year office clerk to learn, at least not in the UK.
The closest to this would be software engineering, but even then, it would take you ~10 years of experience to reach the level of a proper senior software engineer, and even that only gets you 80k on average in the UK - a sizeable chunk of which will get stolen by the taxman.
10 years of effort starting from scratch to not even be able to double your salary (and again, the net salary is even smaller, as taxes increase) is not a winning strategy. You're better off bullshitting and playing office politics to move up in the pecking order at your current company and increase your salary that way.
I offered people working in a call centre environment to learn crm administration: gradually, with all the support they may need, etc. We would have transitioned them into new roles once they gained some knowledge. The pay in new roles would have been higher than they'd ever get in the call centre environment.
There are lots of things people can learn in a relatively short period of time that would benefit them. It may not be financial reward at first, but being able to draw the necessary insights, do things faster and more efficient are beneficial the many.
It's not about what you learn, but about how you apply it. The chances are, if someone's a clerk, he/she isn't really into "upskilling" in the first place. People don't ever change fundamentally, especially after they get a small taste of the economy.
This is very accurate in my experience. People complain about a lack of training but when you provide an avenue for it hardly anyone takes you up on it.
i directly tell my employees that learning some new tech or other skill that we may need is part of their job. (and they get to do it during work hours of course)
it helps that we are working with less common tools to begin with, so i hire people that are willing to learn something new from the day they join.
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The only place I have found this not to be true is in finance, where there is a clear incentive to reduce operational costs in order to increase the bonus pool. In engineering, tech, healthcare (almost everywhere in local govt), actually acquiring skills is pointless (if you are able to nepo your way into a management role).
That is how you end up with large numbers of over-qualified people simultaneous with low productivity. All the subsidies and incentives for firms to train staff make no difference, we have all the skills we need but the price of those skills is very low.
The problem is management competence. Most managers are also unskilled, even managers with technical skill usually come into management after graduating not after working at a lower level.
This kind of mismanagement happens everywhere but is the rule in the UK. The US is quite far from perfect, but the UK is not even close to this level yet. We are still at the level where the system is not working.
Most middle earning jobs don't need hard skills anymore, so most of employees gradually lost them over the time (and not the opposite, like a muscle). The gen-Z is additionnaly often missing the most basic soft skills : basic, social skills, punctuality... or even coming to work at all.
So we are gradually building a generation where about two-thirds of people have... no more or almost no skills whatsoever. Can't change a wheel, can't swap a breaker, can't replace a tap, can't do more than basic IT-assisted tasks in a predefined process. More and more youngs must try hard to get their driver license, and so city dwellers conveniently skip it (but a good thing in the end). To the point that basic maths are a thing of the past for them. Perhaps 10% are currently able to write this very comment. Let's not even talk about financial education at this point, more than 60% fail at giving you the right amount of two years worth of an account interests.
I can witness that even business holders are gradually losing skills at running their own businesses those last two decades. Their skill in the differents subjects they must address all day long are almost all declining, even their core ones. They don't want to make longer work hours anymore than their employees and want to "Netflix and Chill" like everyone else.
Remains about the 20% skilled, but I have the feeling that over the last 20 years their portion is progressively shrinking. Lack of forecast made health pro number dwindle, "true" engineers (mechanical/electrical/civil) are harder and harder to find since a non-negligible part of them leave the country after completing their studies.
Are we going to make Idiocracy a reality sooner that expected ?
- France has significantly higher productivity per hour than the U.K., but possibly this is due to workers working fewer hours. France has also had (slightly) better productivity growth since the financial crisis
- Is it actually relevant for young people to be able to replace taps or whatever? Cars are more reliable these days so there are fewer forced learning opportunities. If you are young and live in some city apartment, maybe you don’t even drive and maybe you shouldn’t be doing DIY plumbing on a property you don’t own. But these also feel to me like quite arbitrary standards – most young people likely have jobs that don’t require them to know how to change a tap and when you were young, your jobs likely didn’t require you to know how to use the Internet (or whatever – I don’t know how long ago you were starting work).
- If you look at the standardised international measures for things like literacy and numeracy, you’ll likely find that (1) the highest level feels like a pretty low level of ability to you and (2) a percentage of any developed country you pick won’t perform at this level, and you’ll likely find that percentage surprisingly high
- So, maybe there’s also an effect where the older people you interact with have picked up random skills over the years and become more ‘stratified’ such that you are less likely to interact with someone whom you think doesn’t know much but the young people you meet haven’t had so many of these random chances and are a more representative sample of the general population?
I don’t know anything about the situation in France though. Maybe you’re just plain right.
The UK is exactly the same btw. One of the changes the current govt is looking at is trying to stop the streamlining of students at 15 into humanities and sciences by making everyone take maths up to 18.
I think the stuff about basic skills is also correct but perhaps orthogonal. Quite agree but it makes us sound like old-school types. I have noticed that younger people don't like using the phone, it is...not good. But I think young people can learn, I worry more about older people preventing their growth.
My observation is that in general managers are optimizing the thing that personally benefits them the most: their pay, promotions and careers. The company doing well has rather little impact on that so they don't optimize for that. Promotions for managers either in the same company or at a new company are often based on headcount they managed. So they focus on making the team grow irrespective of value from that. Their bosses are aiming for the same thing so everyone is aligned.
It's not incompetence but a lack of belief that helping the corporation for the sake of helping the corporation is of any value.
But the example I gave is more prevalent within engineering generally. Engineering grads will hope to either work in banking or go directly into management scheme (GE was the premium one...when GE was big, defence is the other big one). The pay for actual engineering work (outside O&G) is very low, and only attractive because PHd work is even more exploitative.
Gotta be somewhat careful about these kinds of characterizations, though. A lot of support staff may not be doing things that are directly producing profitable output for the company, but they still provide necessary services (and, well, support) that enable the people who are "line workers" to be more, and more consistently, productive.
A great example is IT, especially in a non-tech-oriented company. Without a competent IT department, your workers will struggle every time there's a bug, or the power goes out, or they forget their passwords. And yet, as has been seen all too often, IT is a "cost center". And, indeed, it's not at all uncommon for there to be many incompetent IT people in a given large company, who are exactly the kind of unproductive drag on the business that you describe.
My point, ultimately, is that any attempt to divide employees into "produces value, good for the company" and "unproductive, bad for the company" cannot be done by simple categorization; it requires actually evaluating the individuals' contributions. Which, exactly as you say, far too few managers are actually capable of doing.
Imo, banks are the rare example of an industry that has moved with the times in the UK (largely because many of them, even the British ones, are run and managed by non-UK people). They are far from perfect, but you don't see bankers getting paid the same back-office admin guy...that does happen in engineering though.
Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking personnel and delegatingdecisions and report to chatgpt.
His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them.
In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now.
I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp.
The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.
- some developers don’t want to work
- some developers have no social skills and work to ruin the morale of everyone else on their team
- some developers don’t want to interact with the client or the business
- some developers don’t want to do anything that remotely looks like project management or agile or otherwise.
- some developers have no idea what the business does or how to meaningfully contribute as engineers
- some developers don’t want to pair, mob or provide training of any kind to junior engineers
- some developers don’t want to participate in interviewing or recruiting others on the team
- some developers just want to write code and go home
there’s a reason we have middle managers and until devs want to do more than “just write code” than…
…there will always be middle management in engineering.
“Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program.
Have a Nice Day!”
It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.
As a software engineer, basically all the skills I use to do my job on a day to day basis are things I've learned from experience, or informal mentorship from other engineers, or reading blog posts on programming practices and then applying those things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
But to an economist none of this counts. A 24 year old that just started their first job after getting a masters degree in CS is considered objectively more skilled than someone with an undergrad degree and 10 years of experience.
In practice, how well this works depends on how effectively employer and training provider coordinate, and how committed the employer is to delivering on the mentorship part.
Working in another field (public services might be a good example) it’s often not possible to test out hypothetical solutions, or find relevant expertise, or to even discover that whole areas of knowledge actually exist. In that context, relevant qualifications have a little more weight.
Not my experience they don't want these people on the Netherlands not with my skin colour I guess.
The full list is here: https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-s...?
Top 3 on the list: Space systems engineer, accounting finance manager, robotic systems engineer
In any case, people leave because they are unsatisfied and/or underpaid so if the company has that covered attrition will be low.
Deleted Comment
(I'm hypothesising wildly, this isn't necessarily accurate).
It's a bit of a daft situation really. Companies spend far too much on hiring that could be going on wages. My wages specifically. :)
This was brought home (pun intended?) to me back in 2015 when my wife and I were vetting realtors for the sale of our house. One of the realtors, actually an 'elderly' husband and wife, after being told (by me) that I was a software developer proceeded to share that they had retired from working in HR at a software company and went on with 'oh my, don't you know how crazy and entitled those ridiculous software developers are!'
That wasn't their first misstep, and we went with a different realtor.
Stop rewarding bad behaviour with bailouts.
The UK acquired the same firms, went full ham on regulation, and there has been massive corporate deleveraging because most banks don't really do corporate lending anymore.
However, any firm that did have existing finance relationships was grandfathered in. Rates fell, and so these old inefficient firms have largely survived hoarding both labour and finance (the UK also has a disproportionate number of very unproductive family-owned firms).
The UK is the textbook case of finding the absolute worst thing to do at the worst time. I wouldn't say the issue is necessarily bailouts but regulators (and particularly the BoE) not understanding that the financial cycle plays a role, that bureaucrats shouldn't be intervening into management decisions by banks, that fiddling the price of money has trade-offs...I agree, but the decision to bailout is a product of beliefs that continued to damage after 2010 (and this was far less the case in the US, the bubble in tech stocks/SPACs/etc. demonstrates that the system is still alive...this didn't happen in the UK).
1) Managers often don't know what skills people lack or how to take them a few steps up using new skills. Usually these are not the core skills people need to do the job. For instance, an accountant could do a decent job, yet only have basic knowledge of excel. The accountant's manager, depending on the complexity and the psce of the company,may or may not be aware of it. Everyone's happy the way it is. However, if the accountant knew Excel better, some tasks would take only half the time, whilst others could be automated and so. This is extremely common in a lot of companies
2) People don't want to upskill. Yes, I'm aware it's a blanket statement, however both as a manager and simply as a colleague, I found this to be the case. Very few,even if they are aware of the problem( e..g. skill shortage) try to address them. I can't count the number of times I told people to at least try to learn x, because their job would become much easier and they'd get more money. Nope, not interested.. Also, actively offering people time and access to learning resources don't seem to help much either.
How much more money? I'm frankly not sure there is any skill you can learn on your own (without full-time commitment and/or paid formal education) in a reasonable time that would make financial sense for a typical 50k/year office clerk to learn, at least not in the UK.
The closest to this would be software engineering, but even then, it would take you ~10 years of experience to reach the level of a proper senior software engineer, and even that only gets you 80k on average in the UK - a sizeable chunk of which will get stolen by the taxman.
10 years of effort starting from scratch to not even be able to double your salary (and again, the net salary is even smaller, as taxes increase) is not a winning strategy. You're better off bullshitting and playing office politics to move up in the pecking order at your current company and increase your salary that way.
There are lots of things people can learn in a relatively short period of time that would benefit them. It may not be financial reward at first, but being able to draw the necessary insights, do things faster and more efficient are beneficial the many.
it helps that we are working with less common tools to begin with, so i hire people that are willing to learn something new from the day they join.
About half of people in the US with college educations do jobs that don't require them. For most of the US population, college is not cost-effective.
This is going to be a problem as the US is forced to get back into manufacturing in a big way by world events.