From the article: "The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. 'It’s hard not to break out laughing,' says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. 'If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,' he says. 'It’s basic economics.'"

Agreed. That is the basic problem. If a worker can produce hundreds of widgets a day after specialized training with new computer-controlled machinery, but the worker could make just as much money per hour right after high school flipping hamburgers at the local fast-food restaurant, there is no reason for the worker to go through two years or more of specialized training, especially at the worker's own expense.

Much of the rest of the article discusses the overall rationality of workers seeking jobs that they can obtain with the least investment of their own time in training for a given income. Of course. Part of the problem is that if companies hire on the basis of course completion certificates rather than on the basis of demonstrated competence, they will miss out on good workers, and yet hire some lousy workers, and thus be reluctant to offer competitive starting wages. (It's expensive to hire a worker who can't do the job, and it's also expensive to let go workers who don't learn on the job and to hire their replacements.)

In what I think has become my best-liked comment on HN, I've collected references other participants here helped me find about company hiring procedures. Companies need to hire on the basis of actually being able to do the job, not on the basis of what classes workers have attended. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. If the job you are hiring for involves use of a computer-controlled machine tool, have the candidate put the machine to use making sample parts (advertise the job in a way that makes clear a work-sample test is required, to screen out people who have no clue how to operate such machines). Hire the able, and pay them what they are worth.

Ask yourself about any hiring process you have ever been in, as boss or as applicant: did the applicant have to do a work-sample test based on actual work results expected in the company? Why not?