In the past couple of decades, innovation, especially Internet-related, has been moving faster than we can educate ourselves to apply advancing technologies. Thus, the shortfall of the supply of advanced skills relative to the demand for them is pressing the wages of the less skilled. The insights that advance cutting-edge technologies emerge from a very small part of the workforce.
While low-skilled jobs are being automated and replaced with computer programs, corporate managers persistently identify the lack of skilled workers as one of today’s greatest ongoing problems and are willing to bid up pay packages to acquire them.
While globalization and technology are causing increased disparities of wealth concentration in many countries, the U.S. seems to have a disproportionate disparity. In his book, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan attributes this disparity to our “dysfunctional elementary and secondary education”. Up until about 4th grade, our students fare pretty well in comparison to other leading nations, but by the time they are seniors in high school they have fallen well below average. Greenspan asks the question: “What do we do to (these students’) learning process that requires business recruiters to dismiss vast numbers of ‘educated’ applicants for modestly skilled jobs because they cannot write coherent sentences or add a column of numbers accurately?”
So, our needs for highly skilled technicians and upper-level management are multiplying much faster than our graduating students can fill them – we must import increasing numbers of qualified and educated people from other countries. Greenspan further notes that our biggest educational weakness is in math and we need to consider alternatives to how we hire and pay our teachers as well as whom we allow to come to our schools and teach….
Here is what Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat has to say:
“The dot com boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard work. All it took was an MBA and a quick IPO, or one NBA contract and you were set for life. Who needed an education? Who needed to sweat over an engineering degree? But while we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China and Eastern Europe were busy figuring out how to take advantage of it. Lucky for us, we were the only economy standing after World War II, and we had no serious competition for forty years. That gave us a huge head of steam, but gradually bred a sense of entitlement and a culture of complacency.”
It takes 15 years to train an engineer or scientist starting with when (if) they get hooked on math in elementary school. We do not have time to fill the ever-widening gap that will be left by retiring baby-boomers and the continually decreasing numbers of graduating engineers and scientists from American Universities and Colleges. We may need to rely on foreign talent at least until we can repair our lower education system. But we also can employ immediate measures to fill the education gap on an individual basis. This will require supplemental education aimed specifically at remediation and mastery of basic concepts in math, reading and writing.
Pinecone Active Learning offers this program.
Please visit http://pineconelearning.com for more info.
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