Employers Are Looking for Job Candidates in the Wrong Places
The employers who can’t seem to fill the United States’s roughly 6 million vacant jobs are at a loss for what to do. Qualified candidates are seemingly nowhere to be found. In Washington, D.C., for example, there aren’t enough workers who have the healthcare-management or sales skills to meet the demands of the hospitals and retail stores and banks desperate to hire, according to a report by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Team. Philadelphia has so many job openings that can’t be filled because its residents lack skills in areas including politics and retail.
Policymakers such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos say the solution is to recognize the range of avenues by which someone can become “qualified” for a given job. Nontraditional forms of education, such as apprenticeships—in which students can participate in in November at the inaugural meeting of the White House Task Force on Apprenticeship Expansion. "We need to start treating students as individuals ... not boxing them in." But such rhetoric seems to overlook the countless employers that won’t change their hiring criteria because they don’t view nontraditional education as credible.
