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Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report:Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates. After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere. "We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others." Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need. "It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."
"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"
The issue is crystal clear and was to be expected. The government decided to allow the employers to treat employees like garbage, and they did because they could find someone else easily. However anyone with proper skills and education can easily be employed in countries like Germany and the Netherlands due to the EU. Close to a million Spanish people left the country since the crisis.
quote from article
The problem isn't that workers lack the skills needed. It's the fact that the companies are looking for the perfect candidates. They have no interest in training people to do the job. When entry level programming positions require compsci degrees and 3 years experience in 5 different languages/libs you know the barrier to entry is a bit too high...
Of course, part of the problem is the employees themselves. The company trains them then poof. The employee runs off to a different job that pays more. No loyalty to the hands that taught you how to fish.
What happens when employers stop re-training employees and start shitcanning anyone as soon as possible, relying on obtaining trained people from the rest of the economy when people are needed again? That's right: trained people are quickly drained from the economy leaving only the trained who command very high wages and the untrained, who cannot be employed.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Every nation has a group of workers who will never be much good at anything more complicated than slopping paint on walls.
About 25%.
Denial isn't going to do anything for them. They just need jobs digging ditches.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
There's several EU countries that have young adult unemployment rates at, near or above 50% now. Seems to me that there's a more serious problem then simply that. Either they don't want to hire people and train them for the jobs, they have requirements for jobs that are stupid or they're shitcanning people who could have been retrained and kept within the company.
Om, nomnomnom...
they want H1B's like workers who are tied to the job and are willing to do what it takes even if means 60-80 hour weeks / not standing up for your rights.
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country. Just the same happening but at an international level.
A lot of industries here in the U.S. are facing a similar situation: there's work they'd like to do, but its using skills that either haven't been in high demand in the past or haven't existed before. The only real solution is to create the workers with the skills that you need, but this is both expensive and generally outside of the scope of what the business is capable of doing. Training programmers, for instance, is a very different business than making industrial control systems.
We're taking a proposal to some of our clients to set up these kinds of training programs for them. But it's not a sure thing that they'll be willing to make this investment, because it's going to mean changes in the way they do business as well.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
corporations who threatened to take their offices/factories elsewhere, defunding the schools, so now they have a shortage of qualified workers and they have to import them. I wonder if they have anything similar to an H1B visa program...
Or maybe they have laws that once you hire someone you're stuck with them for years. Hence nobody hires unless they know the person is already skilled.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
To put things in perspective, consider some numbers:
Spain's population is about 47 million
Spain's labor force is about half that (23 million)
The "5 million unemployed" represents more than 20% of the workforce.
If a headhunter can't find people in the country and has to import, my question is this: is globalism bad for Spain?
Globalism is taught as the one-true-religion in economics circles right now, but I'm wondering if this is a dodge. While globalism has made a handful of companies richer, it drives the people into poverty.
Is it possible that we have too much globalism?
Have the employers these workers aren't qualified enough for tried raising salaries or paying to train people?
It sounds exactly like what we older workers deal with in the US. Once we start making 'too much," we're targeted for elimination because someone with no family or responsibilities can be employed much cheaper. I know it's very possible to let one's skills atrophy, or do the same job for 20+ years, but I don't do any of those and get lumped in with the "too old" crowd. As a result, I never get responses from a cold call resume submission -- most of my jobs recently have been found because people know me.
As for "not qualified," no one is a 100% drop-in replacement. Not even the Infosys, Tata or Wipro guys they send in...which is also part of the problem. Companies don't train people anymore, and expect them to be immediately productive on the first day. A generation before I graduated, large and even medium employers had extensive training programs for new hires. It was possible for someone motivated to come in out of high school. or you could graduate with a generic degree. As long as the new hire was motivated and trainable it didn't matter.
So yes, I think Spain is starting to get a taste of how the tech employment market is for US workers. I feel the current visa system in the US needs to be reformed (not eliminated) to allow for the domestic workforce to grow. No one with a modicum of sense is going to go into engineering, computer science or other STEM fields if they are destined to be the new humanities degrees in terms of employment success/ROI. Once people see a future in these fields, they'll study them again.
I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.
So since they were looking for employees for a period of just two months, they offered 16667 Euro? Would anyone who left his home country for a better job market elsewhere return for 16667 Euro? That might not even cover the relocation cost...
Having come from two small villages... Bullshit.
Most villages are labor intensive, low mental req, and low profit systems. People share the work because there is too much of one thing to do in the window it must be done. You start working with the sun up (meaning you get ready well before), rest when high, and return home when down (you wash, eat, and sleep quickly). And every day of every season there is a natural schedule that must be followed else you will fall behind.
In most places, most of the family works and contributes in one way or other. You have your upper, middle, and lower classes. Only the upper and middle can afford education.
In return for all this, you are in the upper class if you can afford the middle class equivalents of 1st world countries. You look at any well developing country and one of the first things you see is the lack of youth in villages... Because they all left for the cities.
Yes, a village is a nice relaxing, low stress environment... Mentally. And if you already have the monies, physically too. If you visit a village and see people sitting around... These are the well off rich people. There 4-6 people for each that they are paying daily who work from sun up to sun down.
This. Socialism leads to high unemployment. You can argue about why, about how everyone is doing socialism wrong, about how this is no true socialism, whatever, but what the EU nations do right now creates high unemployment. And the problem worsens over time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Here is an idea, why not make all Government workers 2 month positions. How many of the leaches currently holding office would do so without any financial security? None, asshole.
If only you knew...
Here in Spain a government worker cannot be fired. Ever.
Pass the entrance exams when you're 20 and you can literally do fuck all, all day long, and you'll still get a paycheck every week for life. Plus Christmas bonus (an extra months wages in December - to get you through the holiday season). Plus a pension.
Right now: All those 5 million in Spain are queuing up for government jobs, not looking at whatever this idiot is offering them.
Between the functionaries doing nothing and the politicians stealing everything it's no wonder the country's in a mess.
No sig today...
A quick Google search shows the US unemployment rate in 2015 was 5.5%, with the UK showing an unemployment rate of 5.4% for the same year. Why don't those evil, socialist, employee protections cause massive unemployment in the UK, I wonder?
The above is mostly a rant but it is true that most Continental E.U countries have strong labor laws that make it difficult to fire an employee. The upside is that employees don't feel the kind of pressure to out-compete each-other and turn into the workaholics that you see in U.S. The downside is that nobody is willing to roll the dice on young people with no experience and a proven track-record
So how easy is it, do you think, to pick up and move yourself (and possibly your family) from here to there, when you have only the dole as income, if that?
"Free to move" is only a valid statement if you have money to move with, not to mention a place to go where you will immediately find employment to pay your bills.
Which is to say, it's not usually a valid statement at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sadly
Its not that easy to move around, if you are young and with no commitments is somewhat easier, but if you have a family, mortgage to pay, and been working for years in a factory, going to another country where they speak a different language and with little money in the bank, leaving your family ties and friends back is a very difficult proposition, the only way i could see people in that situation to move to another country would be if they were in a situation like Iraq
The OP also assumes that there are jobs in other EU countries he could get.
By and large, if you're in an industrialized country you find your jobs are taken by immigrants from a pastoral country, but be unable to find equivalent jobs in those other countries.
To take a specific example, one slashdot commentator noted the tech workers at a cancer testing facility in the UK were Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, and Greek.
How likely would it be for a qualified UK worker to find a job in Greece, Poland, or Spain?
This is one of the lies of globalism, that you can go to other countries to find jobs.
The economic "theory" of globalism is founded on a rationalisation.
"Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in âoeAgileâ project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Pimentel is a fucking sociopathic moron.
No, I mean it. That's all that needs to be said.
But in reality, he was *not* a) offering 200 grands for a suitable candidate and b) he wouldn't know a suitable candidate even it he was spouted to his face.
Oh, and c) his customer wouldn't distinguish "agile" from "eagle" even looking at wikipedia.
Forcing labor intensive manufacturing to on-shore won't magically create a domestic blue collar workforce.
Say a company has a widget that costs a dollar to be manufactured in China and shipped to the US. That same widget if manufactured in the US today costs two dollars.
Adding tariffs such that the Chinese price would equal or exceed the domestic manufacturing cost would in theory incentivize domestic production. What it would do in reality is incentivize investments in automation to reduce the domestic production cost to any point below the two dollar mark. Removing the cheap option will just make companies move to the next cheapest option not just jump to the most expensive option.
Labor intensive low-skill production happens in places where the labor cost is low. There's no incentive in having human beings doing the work unless they are cheaper than machines.
Trying to force labor intensive manufacturing to return to developed first world countries will just hasten the adoption of automation. This will mean output and profit margins won't change for manufacturers and the number of manufacturing jobs will remain constant or decrease. Robots have less management overhead than humans and can be retrained for new positions much faster.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
From the (Bloomberg) article: "From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe".
Yea, right. Mathematical modelers are always thin on the ground and software developers can be, depending on what you ask. Geriatric nurses are an impopular specialisation, and demand is growing fairly quickly. Working conditions tend not to be the best though, so it's not the most popular specialisation. Takes a year and a half to qualify though, and not many hospitals are willing to pay you to do it. Those that are pay you a pittance, fire you the day you graduate, and start with the next bunch of trainees.
Problem is: can you trust current industry demand to guide your choice of curriculum?
Answer: No you can't. Companies (with the exception of the likes of Shell, IBM, GM, Unilever etc.) don't plan any further ahead than 6 months. Easier and cheaper that way. So, current industry demand isn't a very good indicator.
And this: "Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in "Agile" project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Salary's pretty good, especially for Europe. But "trained in agile". Does that mean "attended a few lectures in scrum or whatever"? No. From the rest of the article: you need to have sufficient experience to know what software development is and what the issues are. And then the article lets it transpire that you'll be talking with senior management ... on your project. Sounds like a "development lead with experience in agile" position to me. Definitely not for your average coder, with or without course in "agile" development bolted on.
I can only conclude that the Slashdot headline is a bit misleading. The Bloomberg headline is more accurate, and the article goes on to lambast the Spanish educational system for not paying sufficient attention to industry needs (STEM subjects).
However ... about a year and a half ago I made the acquaintance of a (very smart) Spanish PhD in experimental physics who (1) couldn't find a fitting job opportunity in Spain when she graduated (6 years ago) (2) went abroad to do a doctorate (3) was subsequently unable to find a faculty position (two years ago) in Europe) and went to work as a data analyst for the government.
Several interesting things in this story: she couldn't find a decent job even though she was smart, motivated, and well-educated, she had to look outside Spain to do a PhD (well, some would call that a valuable education in itself), then couldn't find a job in the field for which she had just qualified (experimental physics), and went to do work for which she wasn't "formally" qualified but for which she was quite well prepared (kudos to that HR department).
Now think of your average HR department. Would they have hired her as a data analist? Nah ... too many boxes not ticked. No Hadoop experience, no Java programming certificates, no certificate in SAS, not SPLUNK certified, no Python programming certificates, no Linux certificates (although she did her PhD work on Linux systems like all physicists). Yup. Probably no MS Office certificates either (but perhaps those can be overlooked).
So it's a sum of circumstances: insufficient attention to trivial but "in-demand" qualifications on part of educational authorities to please box-ticking HR departments, HR departments being generally unable to bring any understanding and intelligence to their job (costs too much to have somebody working there who actually understand what the job entails, right ... so keep with the box-tickers). industry as a whole being unable to provide reliable forecasts of future personnel demands.
Ok serious question, why wouldn't you just hire someone with clearance with enough knowledge to be trainable. Either by current employees or by contracted (who wouldn't need the same clearance). I'm certain that wasn't realistic but I'd like to know why.
I know for a fact that 40 years ago large companies had internal training programs. Someone close to me who is now retired but had a long career in programing was hired by TWA as his first job. He was hired because he was smart and responsible but he had never programmed. So he entered as a trainee, and had badge with that designation until he got up to speed and was promoted to standard programmer.
Things were different then, because companies were more likely then to have their own home rolled set ups but when corporate America has as need they have proven resilient.
I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.
In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.
As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.
WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.
I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"I once hired for a job that required a security clearance and some deep TCP/IP packet skills. In a year I found -zero- qualified applicants"
You talk about "deep TCP/IP packet skills" as if it was some kind of arcane only the maesters of Antigua can deal with or something like that. Hint: any promisory IT freshman can do that.
So you lost a year worth of opportunity costs because you'd better not train anyone. And somehow that's the "talent pool" fault.