Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Skills Mismatch!

Matt Yglesias:

And it turns out that with a little extra work it's perfectly possible to train someone up who doesn't have 100 percent of the exact qualifications you're looking for. In an even more dramatic example you might think of World War II and the Rosie The Riveter phenomenon. Rosie was not a skilled aerospace engineer before she got that riveting job. The whole point was that the government needed both a massive expansion in the quantity of aircraft produced and also needed to divert a huge share of the male labor force into the military. But the Roosevelt Administration didn't just throw its hands up, say "skills mismatch", and lose the war.

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