Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has a few things to say about the skills gap – the persistent lack of qualified people to fill some of the three million jobs open in the U.S. “We’re in the midst of a perfect storm: a Great Recession that has caused a sharp increase in unemployment, and a Great Inflection – a merger of the information technology revolution and globalization that is wiping out many decent-wage, middle-skilled jobs, and replacing them with decent-wage, high-skilled jobs. Every decent-paying job today takes more skill and more education, but too many Americans aren’t ready,” says Friedman. He recommends a solution that has been practiced for decades: putting industry experts into schools and teachers into industry.
Still, U.S. schools and universities can’t keep pace with teaching new skills, so companies — especially small ones — are turning to other solutions. One is to do the training themselves. Wyoming Machine, a sheet metal company in Stacy, Minn, hired a certified welding inspector to train company welders in the science and math needed to hold current-day welding jobs. Wyoming Metal’s CEO, Traci Tapani, said that training their own workers is often the only way for employers to adapt to the “quick response time” demanded for “changing skills.”
Another solution is to outsource specific tasks and there are dozens of start-ups waiting to help small companies. Fiverr, headquartered in Tel Aviv, provides small services such as designing business cards, editing newsletters, and making short videos. SkillPages, based in Ireland, connects skilled workers with companies wanting to outsource complex, highly specialized tasks. Start-ups Guru, oDesk, and Elance also focus on skilled work and LinkedIn added a “skills” component to its profiles in 2011.
For location-specific jobs, try TaskRabbit. Their errand-runners will assemble your knock-down furniture, wrap gifts, and even stand in line for you.
