“Eighty percent of the manufacturing companies in the United States say they cannot find enough workers with the proper skills to fill open positions at their facilities.” –President Barack Obama, announcing the Military-to-Civilian Skills Certification Program in June of 2012. Many corporate executives and politicians in Illinois purport that the state’s workforce does not have the skills necessary to compete in the modern economy. According to the conventional wisdom thousands of job openings go unfilled each month because people looking for a job allegedly lack the skills that employers need. Many employers contend that jobs are readily available and that the main reason that workers remain unemployed is that they are unqualified. One executive, Tim Sullivan, the former CEO of Bucyrus International, Inc. and special advisor to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, even went so far as to assert that states “don’t have a jobs crisis, we have an education crisis” (Levine, 2013).
A Manufactured Myth: Why Claims of a “Skills Gap” in Illinois Manufacturing are Wrong
“Eighty percent of the manufacturing companies in the United States say they cannot find enough workers with the proper skills to fill open positions at their facilities.” –President Barack Obama, announcing the Military-to-Civilian Skills Certification Program in June of 2012.
Many corporate executives and politicians in Illinois purport that the state’s workforce does not have the skills necessary to compete in the modern economy. According to the conventional wisdom thousands of job openings go unfilled each month because people looking for a job allegedly lack the skills that employers need. Many employers contend that jobs are readily available and that the main reason that workers remain unemployed is that they are unqualified. One executive, Tim Sullivan, the former CEO of Bucyrus International, Inc. and special advisor to
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, even went so far as to assert that states “don’t have a jobs crisis, we have an education crisis” (Levine, 2013).