Underpaying Workers Is Not a 'Skills Gap'

Good points, Ariella.  And then mediocre managers do not know how to manage "skilled workers".  So they would rather hire underskilled people who will not demand good leadership and/or will accept low wages.

I agree that underpaying may be the problem.  I see it that well trained premium workers create greater value for business.  Those who effectively hire and utilize skilled workers get good value in return.

We need to start recognizing the value of workers, not just the cost.

DHagar

Ariella, I remembered that after posting my original comment... thank you for pointing it out.

Actually the Peter Principle is not that incompetent people will be promoted but that people who are doing well will continue to be promoted until they hit a job that they do not handle competently. In the word of the book,The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong  "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." The idea there is that a good engineer may be promoted to become a mediocore middle manager.

That's a great story about Sanders. I was fortunate enough to work for Computer Products Inc., which made I/O equipment that interfaced to folks like Modcomp, Harris, SEL, DEC, and DG. CPI was pretty good about letting people switch back and forth between managment and engineering tracks if they found they (or the company) had made poor choices, and so they held on to a lot of really good people. But in client companies and places where my friends worked I often saw the 'kicking upstairs' phenomenon in action. Unfortunately a couple of places I worked later were not so interested in performance as was CPI, and I never felt as much at home as I had in those years from '77 to '88.

I recall my days at Sanders, before they were purchased by Lockheed (and later by BAE).  Sanders had the bad habit of "kicking people upstairs" - but not telling them.  We ended up with a huge number of VPs who felt that they had to sign off on everything, and every one of them had their own opinion.  It became impossible to purchase any kind of computer equipment in less than a year.  As soon as Lockheed bought the company, a lot of those folks got fired, and productivity went way up (at least so I'm told, I'd left by then).  Supposedly the same thing happened to Sanders' graphics division - kept losing money until it was sold to Harris, at which point a lot of folks were kicked out and it became wildly successful.

Ha ha good point Chuck -- sometimes they do promote as well.

Yes unfortunately sometimes certifications are used incorrectly as a screening tool.

You point out, "Sometimes, organizations hire someone unqualified without realizing it. About a year later, they decide they're not getting the right value from the role. So, they make organizational changes; sometimes they alter the reporting relationships, and sometimes they even get rid of the role."

Yes. And sometimes, they promote the employee...

As you rightly point out, a lot of the "skills gap" is really a "we want it cheap" problem. But you also bring up another issue, when you point out that employers want "high-level certifications such as CISSP, ITIL, Six Sigma, PMP."

An awful lot of senior people came through when such certifications were non-existent.  And I might add that an awful lot of us thing that most of these certifications are malarky - it's not like they're professional engineer or medical licensure.  I expect that most of the people with the desired skills don't have such certification, can't be bothered to get it, and perhaps its the case that many with those certifications don't have the depth of skills or experience as those who don't.

But... it sure seems like HR departments have come to like very long laundry lists of skills and certifications - and they use software packages to screen out resumes that don't line up exactly with the laundry lists.  (Personally, I prefer to hire programmers who find it easy to learn a new language as need be, not those who can check off dozens of languages that they've written "hello, world" in.)

Good point. I too have seen where managers get praise for things that will inevitibly turn around and bite their successor in the butt. The tricky part about IT is that, we typically know what costs the most up front, may be what saves the most in the end. But, executives want to see the opposite... they want costs down up front and don't pay as much attention to the end. It then becomes a case of "told you so" when that end comes to fruition and it's time to pay up.