"The same is true of skills. If 10,000 printers are
required in the market and you have trained 12,000
printers, you still have 2000 printers unemployed so
skills training has the double effect of redundant
training expenses and surplus labour driving down
the wages of those employed."
Some of the 2000 printers will get jobs because their
wages have been forced down. In another context Kim
Swales answered this point: "... training a million
hairdressers would create jobs by cutting the wages
in hairdressing through competition. A further increase
in employment would occur if standards were raised and
we had our hair-cut more often, foregoing expenditure
on less labour-intensive goods."
I think Kim meant this as a partial reducto ad absurdum:
we both feel that other proposals should be investigated
because of doubts about current policies for creating
jobs through training.
I have particular worries about the effectiveness of
current education and training unconnected with the
theoretical case. These have been fostered by
postings sent to http://www.faxfn.org . Some of these
indicate a very serious disenchantment with current
experience of training from the point of view of
trainees and employers.
Areas of concern include nursing, mechanical engineering,
civil engineering, media studies, civil engineering,
sports science and linguistics. One constant theme
is that for training to be effective it must be
on-the-job training and, of course, on-the-job
training requires the trainee to have a job.
I do not wish to over-emphasise these fairly informal
postings but I do get an uneasy feeling that more
heavyweight research into the effectiveness of training
and education is not done because the potential researchers
are mostly in educational institutions.
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