The US job market is a much different beast then previous downturns and we need to change our strategy for attacking it. When the housing bubble crashed it leveled the construction industry as well as manufacturing. This rippled over and a lot of small businesses that were inefficient or didn’t have the means to survive for the 5 to 6 months when consumer spending contracted didn’t survive. The people left jobless can’t get jobs in their former industries because those sectors are dead in the water or growing very slowly. And they lack the training to move to industries where open positions are available because those generally require skills that take time and schooling to develop.

In an interview, Mr. Burtless called the argument that the U.S. is suffering from a skills mismatch “nonsensical” because employment in most industries has declined over the last couple of years, suggesting there is little work to be had – period. It’s possible that some specific occupations are understaffed, but if there’s a broad misalignment between available jobs and available workers, Mr. Burtless insists it doesn’t show up in the labour statistics.

I’ve seen similar in the hosting industry over the last few years. When we hire someone we have to train them ourselves or hire them from a company that trained them. Right now we have six open positions we are trying to fill and the number of US applicants who are qualified is very low. The people coming in from retail, construction, and manufacturing lack the drive to learn new skills. And I can’t blame them as most of the available jobs are asking them to learn computer skills that they have no experience with they can’t muster the passion for. Starting pay for a level 1 chat, phone, or ticket support position in web hosting is $10 dollars and they are faced with making about the same or less plus having to start on the ground floor of an entirely new industry.

This isn’t just something the US is facing, India has problems too but they are able to do a lot better because their labor is so cheap that the manual labor market is still exploding as they grow their infrastructure. And with the income gap in that country you still have the middle class hiring people for housekeeping and other activities that are non existent in the USA.

I think the money the USA is spending currently  should be split between two things to combat this:

    First, we need to start a national program to rebuild our power infrastructure. The improvements made over the last few years to our highway system our great but we need to shift this over as it has more benefits. Our power grid needs to be redone to be smarter and we need to start work on new nuclear plants, new solar fields, and new wind farms. This has the added benefit of training people in those industries which are going to grow over the next decade.

    Second, we need to start a national program to cover 90% of the tuition or other training costs in fields that have high job growth. For fields like engineering, computer science, programming, teaching, etc we need to provide a financial incentive for people to learn those. And this doesn’t mean only college, technical schools and others can often train people faster and better in some fields.

I think if we work on those two things over time our unemployment rate will fall and the country will be posed to capitalize on the long term changes of the global economy.