Competition for the increasing limited supply of those with skills is driving up wages, which is an obvious benefit for the employee, but is also inflationary for the employer’s product or service. And it doesn’t increase the supply until more people are attracted to those trades, and then not until they’re trained. Thus begins a boom for skills training.
While popular media focuses on “higher ed” issues, the long-ignored challenges are in expanding the availability of schools that teach skills associated building, maintaining and operating the essential physical infrastructures of our society, from highways to hospitals, and from semiconductor fabs (fabrication plants) to the shale fields. These are all the kinds of skilled jobs that were labeled “essential” in the months of the Great Lockdowns. They’re also often the “dirty jobs,” as TV’s Mike Rowe, the champion of such work, labeled them. They’re the kind of jobs that require people to show up, to be hands-on.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Dakota Digital Review
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.
This piece originally appeared in Dakota Digital Review