The idea that U.S. workers lack the skills businesses desire may, in fact, be a myth, argues Wharton School Professor Peter Cappelli. Still, it may be time for new legislation to help these workers find gainful employment.


News stories during the recession reported on the “Man Bites Dog” stories of employers who can’t find job candidates to hire even though there are millions of people looking for jobs. 

A Conference Board report from 2009 concludes that about half the employers think their new hires are inadequately prepared for work. Note that these are not job candidates, but people who have already been hired.

At the same time, we see stories about the competition for unpaid internships being so great that people (by that I mean parents) pay significant fees to get access to them. Why are they paying for the privilege of working for free, above and beyond the tuition already spent for education that is increasingly focused on getting a job? Because the internships provide the work-based skills that future employers want and that can’t easily be learned elsewhere.

There seems to be something wrong with the picture painted by these two accounts, with employers complaining that applicants aren’t ready to work, while potential applicants are so desperate to improve their skills that they are paying for opportunities to practice working. There is something big behind these two accounts, and it has to do with who is responsible for work-based skills.

We get a clue from the fact that none of the employer stories that I’ve seen about inadequate applicants refer to entry-level jobs or to those that require only skills that can be learned in schools. The conclusion people typically draw from these accounts about inadequate worker skills is that the problem is with the education system, that schools must be failing and students are leaving with inadequate skills. Whether there is something to that view is a different issue, but these accounts almost never refer to jobs that require only the skills school leavers have.

In the “old days” (and by that I mean before the 1980s), employers hired applicants based on the potential to do the job. Entry-level positions were very basic, and there was no expectation that new hires were ready for detailed training associated with more sophisticated jobs. They gradually got used to the workplace. Training programs were extensive, and apprenticeships and related models were as much about teaching young people how to behave at work as they were about teaching job-specific skills. And the new hires tended to stay with the employer for life.

Investments in new hires have shrunk dramatically, perhaps because employers no longer expect new hires to be with them for long. The expectations are that new hires should be able to “hit the ground running” in the sense of contributing very soon, if not right away.

A little less than half the employers in the Conference Board survey provided any training for workforce readiness. If that still sounds like a lot do, note that the “training” seems pretty minimal: allowing employees to read materials on the intranet was the most common technique.  New hire orientations and on-boarding programs seem to qualify as workforce readiness training as well, so the actual investments in most of these programs aren’t big.

The report indicated that employers who provided no such opportunities thought that it was not the employer’s responsibility to do so. So whose responsibility is it? Most of the gaps that employers in the Conference Board report saw in their new hires center on behaviors like “creativity,” “ethics,” and “professionalism.”

Maybe the problem is simply unrealistic expectations. Expecting to find candidates with professionalism and creativity in jobs that pay less than $10 per hour, for example, is asking a lot. As Patsy Cline once said, “People in hell want ice water – that don’t mean they get it.” It wouldn’t be surprising to find that people want more than they can get: Most of us would like cheaper cars with better fuel economy and more gadgets, yet we don’t see that as a public policy problem.

But there is a fundamental disconnect here. How are young people supposed to learn the work-based skills and behaviors associated with success in the workplace? What employers want in new hires is not in conflict with what most people would think are important attributes to be a good person and citizen, but schools  have a hard enough time meeting their basic mission of teaching students traditional academic material.

Individuals can’t learn these skills by themselves, and few can pay for entry-level job experience to get them. The best place to learn work-based skills, hands down, is at work. Employers have to get back into providing entry-level work skills, but we may not expect them to foot the bill for investments that they can’t keep.

Fifteen years ago, the exact same issue was hotly debated in policy circles. That debate produced the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, which was designed to bring employers and schools closer together. Work experiences like co-op programs and internships were coordinated with classroom lessons so that the workplace illustrated academic content and the classroom content informed what went on in the workplace.

A crucial part of these programs, though, was having employees mentor students and teach them the attitudes required to succeed on the job. The Act seemed to spur a lot of interesting programs, and a tight labor market helped, and companies wanted to hire the best students they saw.

The Act and the funds to support it went away after 1999, but maybe it’s time to bring back something like it again.

Peter Cappelli is George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is a member of Workforce Opportunity Services’ Academic Advisory Board. This article was adapted from a column Cappelli writes for Human Resource Executive magazine.

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