An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report:
Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates. After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere. "We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others." Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need. "It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."
Re:Or they offer too little
By pablo_max
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2016-Jul-2 13:52
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"
You would think so, but no.
That is more of an American thing I think.
I am an American expat living in Germany. I was recently offered a job in Spain for a lot of money. Much more than I make in Germany. I don't speak a single word of Spanish. Poor German and English only.
I actually thought about it, but at the end of the day, it's Spain. Great to visit, but not to live.
Re:Abusive government
By geoskd
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2016-Jul-2 13:59
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
it also puzzles me why the Spanish government and employers association are not actively providing facilities to educate unemployed workers to take the vacant positions.
Because you don't train someone, who has been manufacturing doorknobs for the last 20 years, to now be an electrical engineer. The majority of these unemployed people are incapable of developing the skillset necessary to handle the work that is available. Given the extremely high payscales listed in TFA, if the unemployed people were capable of learning it at all, they would have already availed themselves of the higher education system to achieve those degrees.
There is a fallacy in this world that anyone can be anything they want. The sad reality is that most people simply don't have the basic talent to become a rocket scientist. Pretending that we can fill an urgent need for rocket scientists by retraining a bunch of gas station attendants is just stupid.
Its time the world faces the reality that there is already an entire class of people who have such a low value to society that the only reason they can survive is because governments artificially maintain minimum wages. Every advance in technology renders an ever larger subset of the population into this class. It is time that humanity stops and decides what the future of the race is going to look like, because if we don't, then the matter will decide itself, and will do so the way it always has: through warfare.
Re:Abusive government
By hairyfeet
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2016-Jul-2 14:25
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
But you aren't allowed to speak about that because of political correctness, you quickly get screams of "dat be raciss!" but political correctness and reality are ALWAYS diametrically opposed and whether we like it or not a person with an IQ of 85 isn't capable of being an electronics engineer, no matter how much money you spend on education.
This is the rotting elephant in the room we MUST face as a society because if we continue on this path? You are gonna end up with 3 quarters of the planet literally worth nothing more than cannon fodder. We are turning Idiocracy into reality with low IQ single moms having half a dozen kids with low IQ men, this was fine in the past because you could always have them work manual labor but the simple fact is for the first time in history technology isn't creating jobs, its replacing them. What are you gonna do with 4 billion people with sub 100 IQs when all the manual labor jobs are replaced by machines, when even the fast food jobs become assembly lines and robot waiters?
Re:Or they offer too little
By Jody Bruchon
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2016-Jul-2 15:16
• Score: 5, Interesting
• Thread
This discussion reminded me of this now nine-year-old video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers."
Read the article ...
By golodh
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2016-Jul-2 18:50
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Well ... to some extent. Lets look at the article itself, shall we?
From the (Bloomberg) article: "From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe".
Yea, right. Mathematical modelers are always thin on the ground and software developers can be, depending on what you ask. Geriatric nurses are an impopular specialisation, and demand is growing fairly quickly. Working conditions tend not to be the best though, so it's not the most popular specialisation. Takes a year and a half to qualify though, and not many hospitals are willing to pay you to do it. Those that are pay you a pittance, fire you the day you graduate, and start with the next bunch of trainees.
Problem is: can you trust current industry demand to guide your choice of curriculum?
Answer: No you can't. Companies (with the exception of the likes of Shell, IBM, GM, Unilever etc.) don't plan any further ahead than 6 months. Easier and cheaper that way. So, current industry demand isn't a very good indicator.
And this: "Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in "Agile" project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Salary's pretty good, especially for Europe. But "trained in agile". Does that mean "attended a few lectures in scrum or whatever"? No. From the rest of the article: you need to have sufficient experience to know what software development is and what the issues are. And then the article lets it transpire that you'll be talking with senior management ... on your project. Sounds like a "development lead with experience in agile" position to me. Definitely not for your average coder, with or without course in "agile" development bolted on.
I can only conclude that the Slashdot headline is a bit misleading. The Bloomberg headline is more accurate, and the article goes on to lambast the Spanish educational system for not paying sufficient attention to industry needs (STEM subjects).
However ... about a year and a half ago I made the acquaintance of a (very smart) Spanish PhD in experimental physics who (1) couldn't find a fitting job opportunity in Spain when she graduated (6 years ago) (2) went abroad to do a doctorate (3) was subsequently unable to find a faculty position (two years ago) in Europe) and went to work as a data analyst for the government.
Several interesting things in this story: she couldn't find a decent job even though she was smart, motivated, and well-educated, she had to look outside Spain to do a PhD (well, some would call that a valuable education in itself), then couldn't find a job in the field for which she had just qualified (experimental physics), and went to do work for which she wasn't "formally" qualified but for which she was quite well prepared (kudos to that HR department).
Now think of your average HR department. Would they have hired her as a data analist? Nah ... too many boxes not ticked. No Hadoop experience, no Java programming certificates, no certificate in SAS, not SPLUNK certified, no Python programming certificates, no Linux certificates (although she did her PhD work on Linux systems like all physicists). Yup. Probably no MS Office certificates either (but perhaps those can be overlooked).
So it's a sum of circumstances: insufficient attention to trivial but "in-demand" qualifications on part of educational authorities to please box-ticking HR departments, HR departments being generally unable to bring any understanding and intelligence to their job (costs too much to have somebody working there who actually understand what the job entails, right ... so keep with the box-tickers). industry as a whole being unable to provide reliable forecasts of future personnel demands.