60 Mins Piece: Can't Find Decent Employees?

[JoeM]

Both I and my wife, who is an HR exec. in medical device manufacturing, saw the show. She would agree with cbelt3's comments above about applicants. She mentioned any serious manufacturing company here in the USA today needs to have some sort of training program in place in order to function because applicants cannot run the various machines.

I can tell you when I was teaching audio engineering at The Center For The Media Arts in NYC back in the late 80's, I wrote a specialized course in tape editing (yes, tape) for mostly dance music and hip hop mixer wanna-bes (the majority of students in those days at the school) that was based around using a ruler to measure tape length as it related to BPM and time signatures. With some basic calculations, a mixer could create a masking tape template, then measure and rearrange a mix by cutting and re-editing a two track.

Well more than half of the college-age students who took that course didn't know any subdivisions on a ruler smaller than 1/2 or 1/4 inch and many couldn't use a ruler at all.

I can only imagine what goes on when some of these applicants show up for a job that requires any type of math calculations.