Well, so much for people thinking they should train as nurses...

[Mr Khan]

famousringo said:

theprof00 said:
id venture it's because evry college and startup now offers nursing degrees, and not enough nurses are being trained properly. This is the same with many industries.

I'd describe it as a problem that more and more industries have no interest investing in people. Rather than train and retain people with the right skills, they demand the prospective employee have the exact skills they need. Of course, nobody comes out of school with 5 years of workplace experience in just the right subject, so they create their own unsolvable labour shortage.

I can see the point. What company would want to invest thousands of dollars training an asset that can walk out the door whenever it likes? But for decades corporations have been undermining employee loyalty by demanding more unpaid overtime, cracking down on labour groups, and laying off staff at a whim. Of course good people are hard to retain! You can't expect any loyalty when you don't show any loyalty yourself.

Schools aren't going to fix this problem, because they can't possibly know the labour market's needs better than the labour market itself does. At this point the labour market will either have to suffer chronic shortages of key labour, or learn to take the risk of training the skills they need (and there may be clever ways of mitigating that risk).

Contracts of some sort would help, something to the tune of "it costs us $**** to train a new hire. If you leave before one year, you'll be obligated to pay us 25% of that." So that they're still free to leave as they wish, but have to reimburse the company for time spent training them.

The really smart companies would simply make their benefits generous enough and their work environment hospitable enough that people aren't going to *want* to leave.