The Skills Gap – North America is the only place in the world that thinks of companies as consumers of skills

There’s a very slim volume out from Wharton Press called, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs.  It’s by Peter Cappelli, a management professor from the University of Pennsylvania, who adapted the book from a series of articles he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and 2011. 

The book takes a simple “myth-busting” approach to the skills debate. Cappelli makes three additional specific points:

1)      Electronic job applications have revolutionized large-company hiring practices – but not necessarily for the better.

2)      Hiring new workers isn’t like shopping at Home Depot.

3)      North America is the only place in the world that thinks of companies as consumers of skills.  Pretty much everywhere else in the world, they are thought of at least partly as producers of skills, because they do radical things like “training”.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at The Skills “Crisis”: Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs | HESA.

Related articles

• HR / Recruiters whose job it was to locate the best candidates have largely disappeared
• The Skills Gap in US – Mismatch across industries and occupations explains at most one-third of the total observed increase in the unemployment rate (
• Skills Gap in US / A barrier to growth for 25 percent of the private companies
• Skills Gap in Boston / Restaurant jobs are going unfilled