“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”   – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As Coleridge’s eloquent stanza from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” states there is water everywhere but not any drop to drink. Well, that’s the plight of a sailor on a voyage in the middle of a sea.

Just substitute water with jobs and the current reality is stark as well, “Jobs, jobs, everywhere.”

Jobs, Jobs, Everywhere:

jobs jobs everywhereSimilarly, millions of jobs are open at thousands of companies but many people don’t seem to get the job they want and have the necessary skills and competencies.  Just among the Fortune magazine’s 100 best companies to work for, there are nearly 200,000 jobs open. And the national unemployment rate stands at a historic low. Well, its jobs, jobs everywhere.

The unemployment rate does not tell the entire story as there are hundreds of thousands of workers who are underemployed participating in the gig economy and doing 2-3 different gigs to get by. Of course, gigs are a choice for some who desire independence but for many others, it is a desperate alternative to a real job and a quest to survive.  Many others don’t show up in the unemployment rolls as they have given up looking for a job.

However, two clear factors emerge to the fore. 1) The hiring managers who impose stringent requirements and looking for the perfect candidate.  We address this in the expectations of exactitude article in more detail.  2) Companies are unwilling to train and reskills their employees for the new era and just create a job opening and wait for the mythical perfect unicorn to emerge out of nowhere.

This is a sad state of affairs and until there is a recognition that the best harbinger of job success is basic skills and competencies and an abundant aptitude to learn and grow.  In this case, we are not even talking about the digital and cognitive age driven reskilling of the workforce.   That is a tall order and society has not figured out how to deal with the emerging cognitive era.

What we are talking about are examples such as these:

If a person sold “yellow” widgets to companies and the blue widget maker deems this experience to be not relevant.

Another applicant has 20-years of experience in R&D but was shown the door as she does not have “design thinking” experience.  For a Ph.D. from an ivy league that has been a part of inventing new things for 20-years, learning about design thinking and taking a course that out of the realm of possibility?

Again, it is that difficult for a successful project manager to learn another so-called methodology – where acronyms change but fundamentals remain the same.

If you are a hiring manager, think about it. Would you ever qualify if another employer or hiring manager were to impose the same expectations of fit and perfection?

What do you think? How do we solve this issue?

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