"Glen" wrote in message
.net...
|
| Oh my God! Does this mean all my woodshop classes for next year
| (2006-07) at the high school where I teach have been dropped? Does this
| mean I am now out of work? Are my fellow IA teachers who teach masonry,
| auto shop and computer repair also out of work? Do we now hold our
| department meetings at the unemployment office?
|
| The scenario you present might be true in some places, but not in all.
| I have been asked (along with a few of my cohorts)to work on a funding
| grant to expand our vocational offerings in our school, and maybe the
| district as a whole.
|
| Glen

In the Seattle area, the aerospace community has been complaining for
several years about just that, and it isn't until the concrete heads in the
legislature realized they were chasing all the skilled labor and shops out
of state have they realized what a skill shortage there is. A day late and
a dollar short, but better late than never. Unfortunately, when I hired on
at Boeing, with a million others barely able to breathe, they trained me on
company time. Got a whole lot of useless folks in the process. This time,
they're training the new hires on their time, for two weeks. A coworker of
mine got hit in the head by a fast moving rivet die. Seems the gal she was
teaching thought it was okay to put the die in the gun while holding the
trigger down. Absent the retainer spring, of course. As soon as she did it
the second time, just minutes later, they told her to take a hike. That's
why they're doing it differently this time around, as the dead wood gets
weeded out quickly. They aren't kicking people out for not having the
skills, they're removing them for not having a trainable attitude.

I recently got a very cool new job. One of the reasons I got the job
was the last line on my resume: "With the right attitude all skill deficits
can be overcome." That impresses the hell out of folks, especially when
your attitude seems to match the resume. (I once had the honor of bringing
onto my crew an older Greek lady who had no skills but just the exact
attitude I wanted. She worked her ass off and made the folks who had been
around for years look like amateurs once I taught her what she needed to
know.) I had also showed them pictures of some machines I had recently
built, which the interviewers (a structured interview with several folks
there) were almost fighting over. They wanted someone who could "do things"
instead of just talking about stuff. My fingernails being a bit chewed up
and slightly dirty helped a bit, I suspect.