An employer cannot fill positions and reports a skills shortage. A training programme is proposed, funded, and built. Three years later the employer still cannot fill positions.
This sequence is common enough to be worth diagnosing carefully, because a training solution applied to a non-training problem consumes years and public money and changes nothing.
Four problems that present identically
A genuine skills shortage. The capability does not exist locally in sufficient quantity, and people who have it are employed elsewhere. Training is the correct response.
A wage problem. The capability exists and is not available at the offered rate. This is not a shortage; it is a price. Training more people does not fix it and may make it worse, since the newly trained will also decline the wage.
A retention problem. The firm can hire and cannot hold. The vacancy is real and recurring, and its cause is inside the organization rather than in the labour market.
A location problem. Nobody with that capability will move to that place, for reasons involving housing, schools, a spouse’s employment, or distance. The training exists; the willingness to live there does not.
Distinguishing them
Four questions, each answerable from information the employer already holds.
Are people applying? No applicants suggests skills, location, or that the position is not visible. Applicants who decline offers suggests wage or location. Applicants who are unqualified suggests skills.
What happens to people once hired? If the position turns over every eighteen months, the problem is retention and no amount of supply fixes it.
What do comparable employers pay? Not nationally. In the same labour shed, for the same work. Employers are frequently benchmarking against their own history rather than against what a person can currently earn.
Where did the last three hires come from? If they were all local and none has stayed, that is a different diagnosis from three candidates who declined to relocate.
Why the training answer is reached for
Not because employers are avoiding the wage question, though occasionally that is part of it.
Training is the answer that is available. It has institutions attached, it can be funded, it produces something visible, and it distributes the cost across the community rather than landing on one firm’s margin.
The wage answer, by contrast, falls entirely on the employer, appears immediately, and is irreversible in practice. The retention answer requires an employer to conclude that something about their own operation is causing the vacancy.
Given a choice between a diagnosis that implicates the market and one that implicates the firm, the first is reached for, and it is reached for sincerely.
What educators should ask before building
A community college or district approached by employers about a programme is being asked to commit years of capacity, and three questions are worth putting first.
What does the position pay, and how does that compare to what a graduate could earn otherwise? A programme feeding into work that pays less than the alternatives will not recruit students, whatever the demand.
How many positions, over how many years, across how many employers? A programme built for one firm’s current gap is exposed to that firm’s next decision.
And what will employers commit, specifically? Paid hours, placements, equipment, a named person. An employer unwilling to commit anything beyond a statement of need has described a preference rather than a demand, and the programme built on it will be under-subscribed on the employer side within two years.
The mismatch that is real
None of this is a claim that skills gaps are imaginary. There is a specific and well-attested version.
Skilled trades in much of this state are held by a cohort approaching retirement, with a thin generation behind them, because for a period the path into those trades was not presented to young people as a serious option.
That is a genuine training and pipeline problem. It also has a long lead time, which means the response has to begin well before the shortage becomes acute, and the incentive to begin arrives only once it has.
An employer noticing that their skilled people are all over fifty-five is looking at a forecast rather than a current condition, and it is the one case where building capacity ahead of visible need is straightforwardly correct.
Getting the diagnosis right is the whole thing
Each of the four problems has a workable response and none of the responses is interchangeable.
A wage problem is addressed by pay or by restructuring the work so it supports pay. A retention problem is addressed by finding out why people leave, which requires asking them six months later rather than at the exit interview. A location problem is addressed by housing, by the institutions that make a place liveable, or by accepting that the position must be filled differently.
Only the first is addressed by training, and an hour spent establishing which one you have is worth more than three years of the wrong response.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD