Title: The Wall

With the current downturn there certainly is no skills shortage.

Prior to the downturn there was no skills shortage either. There was an experience shortage. There never really is any shortage of workers capable of doing the work that needs to be done. Lots of us become knowledgeable in a number of technical fields simply by reading books and practising. This does not make us experts but it does mean that in many cases we can get up to speed with a new technology in a matter of weeks and often less.

Suppose we take the charitable view that there really is a serious skills shortage and that formal training is required. What is almost always overlooked is that employers are almost never interested in workers who have merely been trained. They always want experience. If employers were more relaxed about taking on workers with knowledge in a particular field but no experience - even paying them slightly less for a few months - I think that many workers would happily fund training for themselves. The government would not need to be involved.

Note that in the majority of cases we are talking about people who are already experienced programmers but may not have experience of skill X, rather than those who have been trained as programmers but have no commercial experience. Clearly the former are likely to be more effective than the latter.

If the government were to invest more in training this would be a waste of taxpayers' money while employer attitudes persist.

When employers train their own staff they are less concerned about the fact that the trainees have merely been trained (I assume).

A disincentive to employers' investing in training is the prospect of trainees' leaving for better paid jobs elsewhere. Though I suspect this is only possible if the trainee obtains, say, a vendor qualification plus a certain amount of experience in the field.

However, a frequently cited reason for workers leaving for better jobs is that their employer wouldn't invest in training. It would be interesting to find out whether companies who invest in training their staff do better overall than companies who don't.

Some say companies should recruit on the basis of attitude and talent rather than technical knowledge. Then the successful ones should be trained up. This concurs with the findings of a US report on the skills shortage by Professor Norman Matloff (see "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html, especially section 7) and I agree completely. In fact, in my experience, attitude is more important than raw ability. (Many "clever" programmers are lousy programmers.) So perhaps "talent" needs to be interpreted in a wider sense.

However, it is far less effort, initially, to weed out job applicants on the basis of scorecard skills matches, so I don't see this problem being solved anytime soon.