From recent studies and commission reports, a convention has developed about the skills employers require--many of which were consistently mentioned by the employers we interviewed. One common conclusion in recent reports is that the skills crucial to employment include a variety of capacities--including motivation, initiative, judgment, the ability to work with others, communications skills, and other abilities included in what the SCANS (1991) report calls "foundation skills"[63]--which are not directly taught in schools and which are quite different from the technical skills required of computer programmers or electronics technicians or proficient drafters. A second nearly universal conclusion is that the basic skills of much of the labor force--the ability to read simple labels and instructions, for example, and the ability to write reports and fill out forms and simple arithmetic skills--are weak. There has been little consensus, however, on the role of technical or job-specific skills including those normally taught in postsecondary institutions--for example, the knowledge of accounting procedures and spreadsheets, familiarity with standard business practices, the command of various computer languages and architecture, facility with electronic circuitry, and the ability to machine parts with a variety of equipment. One survey of employers suggested that job-specific knowledge in jobs requiring "some college" are less important than motivation and other "foundation skills" (McPartland, Dawkins, & Braddock, 1986)--though thirty-four percent of employers still say specialized knowledge is extremely important.[64]
Furthermore, while a general consensus has developed that the quality of education needs to be improved,[65] the role that formal schooling plays in employment success remains unclear. In surveys of employees undertaken in 1983 and 1991, the importance of education varies substantially among various segments of the labor market. Those with baccalaureate and graduate degrees (as well as individuals in the highest managerial and professional occupations) reported that formal schooling is much more important than formal or informal on-the-job training in obtaining their job. By contrast, only small numbers of those with a high school diploma (15% in 1991) reported formal schooling to be important, while twice as many (30.3%) required formal or informal company training. In between, however, individuals with "some college" reported that formal schooling and on-the job training are equally important, with 36.5% responding that formal schooling was necessary to obtain their job, 31.9% reporting that on-the-job training was necessary, and 16.1% citing formal company training. Within the sub-baccalaureate labor market, then, the balance of formal schooling and experience or on-the-job training is approximately equal, though the balance necessary may vary substantially from occupation to occupation.
The responses from employers in the four labor markets we examined were, fortunately, highly consistent. Even though these employers varied in size, sophistication, and sector, they repeatedly stressed the importance of skills in five distinct areas.
In our interviews, the dominant skill required by the majority of employers was facility on specific machines or with particular manufacturing processes (for business occupations, accounting, and the like), familiarity with procedures specific to a given job (e.g., accounts receivable or cost accounting), or familiarity with a specific computer program (i.e., highly job-specific skills). For drafting, for example, the head of a firm in Cotooli that employs contract drafters described the specificity of different CAD systems:
In any case, you do a certain amount of targeting. I mean, if they ask themselves, "What do I want to draft?" and if the answer is I want to draft aircraft, then they should see what the GE, the Pratt and Whitney, the Allison, and the McDonnell-Douglas systems are. On the other hand, if you say, "Well, I want to live in Cotooli and work on [consumer products]," there's only one answer: AUTOCAD--you've got to know AUTOCAD or you're out of the business. So they need to look and target and maybe do some soul-searching and some marketing and take a little risk.
Consistently, the kind of job-specific preparation that educational programs provide was criticized as too general. For example, a manager of electronics technicians for a semi-conductor firm complained,
What we'd really like to have [in addition to basic mathematical skills] that we can never really find is things that are more focused on semiconductor processing. There is no hope of finding somebody out of school who has done anything in plasma processing or knows what lithography is or any of the basic diffusion. We actually would have a course for our own technicians where we say, this is diffusion, impurities diffusion, sifting solids at different rates at different temperatures, and [we] start going through and teaching that; here is what plasma etch is and here is how you create plasma and here is how you set up electric fields to etch. All that stuff we have to teach on our own because I'm not aware of any college anywhere that we could get qualified students.
In some cases, employers acknowledged that school-based programs could not possibly meet their needs because the demands of the job are too idiosyncratic. As a manager for a Frankton cable manufacturing firm said,
Unless you've worked in plant maintenance in the past, it's really hard to come in here and start working. Plant maintenance is kind of strange. Industry is not standardized. Electronics technicians come in [from educational institutions] and see our technicians all greasy and funky from the equipment, and they don't know what to make of it--they don't want any part of it. There are just so many different variables. This plant needs a specific type of worker. To train for this specific type of worker--I don't know if you can actually do that.
This particular individual recommended more work-study programs as a way to combine more general education and job-specific training, a solution similar to the co-op programs in Cotooli; but in the absence of such a program, he stressed the value of experience in hiring decisions.
The overwhelming importance of highly specific job-related capacities helps explain many other aspects of employment practices in the sub-baccalaureate labor market, especially the reliance in hiring on experience doing similar kinds of work. Consistently, when employers mentioned sending employees back to school, they did so in order to have them learn the particular computer systems or production technologies required on that specific job, not for general education.
Employers also commonly mentioned a number of motivation-related and interpersonal capacities, including several included among "foundation skills": motivation, initiative, judgment, an appropriate attitude (especially in services and occupations dealing with the public), and communications skills. Indeed, while technical and job-specific skills are important, many employers rated certain "foundation" skills--especially motivation--as even more important. The manager of a custom machining company in Cotooli described the importance of technical skills and motivation in the following way:
Skill is nice but not--we have guys out there who are super-skilled, but you can't get anything out of them because they don't feel like working that day. You have other people who are adequate [in their technical skills] who work hard all day--you're going to get just as much out of them.
In a particularly thorough definition of these skills, one electronics firms in the Rosefield area developed specifications for electronics technicians by getting all six supervisors to come to a consensus about the requirements of effective technicians. The process resulted in the following list:
One crucial skill is initiative--particularly, as several employers expressed this capacity, the combination of initiative and responsibility that one described as "ownership." As the director of human resources of a sophisticated high-tech manufacturer in the Palmdale area expressed this capacity, commenting on the electronics technicians who had been unsuccessful,
It's the lack of willingness to take ownership [that causes people to leave], not being forward. If you see a problem, you own it, regardless of who you are and what level you are at. That's kind of a cultural thing here. Sometimes it's not well-received by people: "I'm here to do my job and that's all. Just because there is a problem over here, it doesn't mean that I'm going to do anything about it." I think that's where the majority [of problems with employees] come in.
Similarly, the manager of an accounting department complained about the difficulty in getting people who are "interdisciplinary":
There are many things within our organization that require coordination across departmental boundaries. Problems arise. What we're trying to do is train our people to respond to those problems and get an effective solution as opposed to compounding those problems. That's one deficiency we've seen in people coming in the door.
Motivation and persistence--a "good work ethic"--is important in every kind of employment, but it becomes especially crucial in production facilities with flatter hierarchies where individuals have several responsibilities: The absence of any one person or an individual's tendency to slack off is more likely to hold up other workers. Initiative and judgment are increasingly necessary in workplaces where hierarchies have been flattened simply because there is less supervision and a greater reliance on individuals. Similarly, communications skills become increasingly crucial as responsibilities expand and work becomes less routinized because one employee is more likely to have to communicate with fellow workers or with suppliers and customers in order to maintain the flow of production.[66] In some cases, interpersonal skills are paramount in hiring. For example, a brewery in Cotooli adopted a team structure for production. When they began hiring for the facility, one of the human resource managers reported,
We focused not on technical skills but on interpersonal skills. We knew we could give them technical skills--that wasn't the issue.
In several ways, then, the importance of these kinds of personal and "foundation" skills is linked to trends in employment: the flattering of hierarchies, the elimination of supervisory layers, and the tendency for employees to have more responsibilities and to interact with a wider circle of other employees.
A large number of employers mentioned dimensions of "aptitude"--a facility which they could identify but which could not be readily taught, in their view. Thus, those hiring machinists look for mechanical aptitude, and sometimes "test" for that by asking applicants about their hobbies. Others mentioned the importance of visual aptitude in drafters, aptitude with numbers for accountants and others working with numbers, and aptitude with people for those individuals working directly with customers. In these cases, aptitude describes a facility with a certain kind of task that speeds up production and minimizes errors, an enjoyment of the task that improves the elusive fit between individuals and their jobs.
In some cases, of course, individuals lacking a necessary aptitude find their way into an occupation nonetheless, but it is not always possible for them to compensate for the lack of aptitude with other skills. The director of a firm in Cotooli that hires contract drafters described a change in drafting with the coming of CAD and the decline of certain visual capacities:
You're seeing a subtle revolution in the drafting field. It used to be that your drafter . . . was probably a person who could visualize. . . . They have a real conceptual mind. Also what you had in the past were a lot of frustrated artists who got into drafting. "Well, I can't be a Van Gogh or Picasso, but I like to draw and I have this capability, so I can use my artistic talent and make money doing it." So you really had frustrated artists with concepts doing this. Today you've got computer people doing this . . . . You're dumping out your frustrated artists and really bringing in the computer hackers . . . because a CAD operator can make drawings without the skills and knowledge of manual drafters. They are not artists. But with a computer they can draw a picture of an airplane or a turbine engine as well as a manual drafter. The only difference is the CAD operator cannot think conceptually and does not have design skills.
Another elusive capacity mentioned by several employers is "common sense." What "common sense" means to various supervisors is not always clear, but it seems to refer to the judgment necessary in any work situation to avoid mistakes, to facilitate and speed up production. One of the clearest discussions of "common sense" came from an engineering manager in a Cotooli semi-conductor firm:
We're looking for common sense, which is something that schools aren't real good at. There's nothing in the school system to test that. I've worked with a lot of book-smart people. I'm a mechanical engineer myself and you get the guys that excel within the academic environment that--if it's in a textbook, textbooks tend to be black and white. There is a correct answer and if there's usually enough information provided, they do fine. They study well; they test well. In the real world, you don't have the certainty. You don't necessarily even have the optimum point on the curve-type scenarios. You have to go in and you have to find something, understand what's wrong with it. It's dirty, it's messy, you have multiple conflicts for your time. It's a different environment. One that at least the academic environments I've been through don't mimic well. . . . Knowing something is only half the equation if you can't produce results with it.
In this description, "common sense" is the ability to apply knowledge--including the kind of job-specific skills learned in school--in production settings whose complexity precludes there being any simple correct procedure or "textbook" solution. But such a facility, while it may be impossible to teach except in the work setting, is anything but "common"; it requires both deep understanding of production process and the capacity to weigh several competing goals in order to judge the appropriate steps to take. In a production setting where individual employers have greater responsibilities and less supervision to help them through problems, "common sense" becomes an increasingly important capacity.
A fourth area of skill cited as necessary in almost every employment situation includes the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. As the widely cited commission reports have stated, the employers we interviewed complained constantly about the lack of basic skills among their sub-baccalaureate employees--with emotions ranging from bitterness to bewilderment but always accompanied by some anger. "The education system is falling apart," said one personnel manager in the Rosefield area: "Local school systems are highly political and very disorganized, [and] the kids suffer." This particular company used to have internships--presumably, given the need for screening and experience, an ideal way to educate new workers--"but we have found out that it is not cost-effective for us: The students don't have the three Rs." Some blamed the process of "dumbing down" the curriculum for deficiencies in basic skills. A manager of a machining shop for a large Cotooli employer--a firm that found it had to provide remedial math to many employees--described the process as follows:
What [vocational schools] tend to do is, students are there, they're not excelling in the academic classes, so they're obligated to give them something. And they lower the level of training to what the people in the class can accept. They lower [standards] down so that the people will not fail, but at the same time they really hurt the people.
In many other cases, employers complained that applicants have sufficient technical skills but lack basic cognitive skills for the job and that basic skills are being given short shrift in overly short training programs. As the director of personnel for a large machining firm in Palmdale complained,[67]
Kids coming out of these programs after one year want to be machinists. And it's just a longer process than that. And these programs, they try to feed so much into them in this 1,000 to 2,000 hours that they're doing, they try to run the gamut between some math, some blueprint reading, but they skip on those to get them onto the machines, and when they don't have those [basic] skills they become nothing more than just operators.
Similarly, a personnel manager of a highly technical manufacturing firm in Cotooli bemoaned the one-sided education of his technical employees:
We just went through a whole series of really exhaustive testing in both math and verbal skills of all of our workers from our plant managers down. And what we found--even among our professional, so-called four-year-degree engineers, all the way down to our newest hires--was a very one-sided education. Our machinists, engineers, electronics folks, and what have you had absolutely no problem with the math. Their verbal skills were atrocious. And in the training site of our facility, one of the things that we have found is that you can't train a quality, experienced machinist in anything else requiring additional skills because he has to be able to read the manuals, he has to be able to communicate his needs to the instructors, and likewise he has to interact with the other students who are going through the training. . . . Likewise, we have our other folks--technicians, managers, whatever--who have great verbal and communications skills but don't know anything about math. . . . And I will tell you, as a representative from our site, people without both sets of skills can't be hired at our company. And I don't think the schools are doing an adequate job in that area. You've got to have the math skills; you have to have the verbal skills. They're equally important. And so if you're talking about the vocational and technical side, don't forget the other side.
Other employers at the same meeting[68] corroborated his point:
A lot of the vocational high schools, when you look at their curriculums, in some cases they've dropped away some of the humanities and the verbal side of the training for the sake of concentrating on vocational or technical skills that they're trying to impart.That's absolutely one of my pet peeves. Vocational schools will come to you and say, "Well, what do you want as entry-level requirements," and then they'll develop these entry-level requirements, and some of them are skill things, but the educational level of things are always less than the high school level. Well, I don't want that.
Although complaints about basic skills usually refer to the cognitive capacities acquired in school, many employers tended to lump motivation with basic cognitive skills; they glide from complaints about academic deficiencies, blaming the schools, to complaints about discipline. As the director of an employers' association in Frankton reported,
Employers are concerned that employees are coming to them and they don't have the basic skills, and they don't understand that [basic skills] are job-supportive. I mean, they come, they can't fill out an application form. They're sloppy; they don't come to work on a regular basis. What is going on out there? The work ethic isn't the same as it used to be.
Many individuals, both educators and employers, mentioned motivational problems and literacy as the crucial issues facing education. Most spoke of these problems as a recent development, as a problem of the younger generation. For example, an employer in Cotooli complained about the change in "values":
When you start out as a young pup out of technical school in the manufacturing jobs, a lot of them, because they're low on the totem pole, end up working night shifts. Now, when I started, that was accepted. You worked night shift, paid your dues. I wonder how many young kids, if you told them they'd have to give up their evenings--they don't like that. I mean, their values have changed.
Employers and educators seem to agree about a generational change. As an electronics instructor at Rosefield City College asserted, using the very common assembly-line metaphor to describe education,
The raw material [i.e., the students] coming in right now isn't the same quality it used to be. It isn't as prepared as it was. It needs more finishing before it reaches this final assembly point. I think it's sociological change--this ideology of wanting to become a chief and not an Indian [i.e., wanting to be a manager and not a production worker].
While it is not always clear how production breaks down when employees lack basic skills,[69] once again the shift to flatter organizational hierarchies where individuals have a wider range of responsibilities and are expected to cope with problems on their own may be responsible. Employers spoke frequently of the need to read instruction and repair manuals, to make appropriate calculations on their own, and to learn by themselves instead of relying on supervisors to tell them how to work out some problem. The need to retrain workers, especially in computer-based technologies, is another change that makes certain academic skills crucial. For example, a plant manager spoke of the need to teach all machine operators some programming so they could reprogram CNC machines on their own rather than calling in a programmer from elsewhere in the plant, but he reported their math backgrounds to be inadequate:
Our main concern is to get all operators capable of programming machines. Now, we try to do that training here as much as possible, but it's tough. Having a mathematical background is the most important thing. People who come in here who've taken algebra and geometry in school, even if it's just high school level, will pick up on the programming of these machines just on their own, just by being operators--and the next thing you know they're doing programming work on them. If they don't have that mathematical background, the programming is Greek to them, so they aren't interested in it, and you can't get them interested in it because they think it's so far above them when it's not. And you can't even talk them into going to a school or anything like that.
The most concrete manifestation of the necessity of basic skills is the nearly ubiquitous requirement of a high school diploma; without a diploma, no applicant will even be considered for the occupations we examined. Employers generally avoided the JTPA and JOBS programs, which include many clients lacking in basic skills. Otherwise, however, employers appeared stumped about what to do to remedy deficient basic skills; one employer of clerks and secretaries who found their language skills to be "ridiculous," said,
I'd like to see something there [to correct basic skill deficiencies], but I don't know. That must be something that is a personal pride or something because you can get the best person from a vocational school and they can't spell. And I just can't understand that.
These employers have not generally instituted their own basic skills test, some of them because they fear lawsuits. Only a few employers within our sample have sent their employees to remedial programs or invested in workplace literacy programs--though this may be taking place in several hidden ways. As an employer in Cotooli remarked,
One area in which I see a lot of partnerships [with education] going on is in the skills enhancement stuff where companies are assessing their people and they're finding out, "By God, it really is a problem; it's even worse than we thought," and developing programs with local schools to encourage people to prepare themselves for career improvement and so forth. It gets all kinds of nice handles, but it's basically remedial skills.
In general, however, employers regard the secondary schools as responsible for instilling adequate basic skills and express considerable anger and amazement that education has failed with so many of their prospective employees.
Another skill requirement that is nearly ubiquitous is familiarity with appropriate computer applications and programs. Business occupations now use word processors, spreadsheet programs, computer applications to calculate payrolls and taxes, computerized information storage, and computerized inventory control programs; drafters have moved from drawing boards to CAD programs; machining is moving to CNC machines; and most manufacturing facilities include some computer-assisted and computer-driven machines. The rise of computer applications provides a role for formal schooling, and--as mentioned above--education providers have responded with a variety of computer courses in both their regular offerings and in contract education.
As a result, many employers look for some computer skills when they hire and--consistent with wanting preparation that is as job-specific as possible--prefer to see applicants familiar with the specific applications and programs they use on the job. However, one surprising finding is that most employers feel that they can teach relevant computer skills on the job or that individuals can learn such skills on the job. One manager reported requiring a baccalaureate for drafters but admitted having an excellent self-taught drafter; others reported taking experienced machinists and teaching them the programming required for CNC machines on the job. As a result, formal schooling is not necessarily a prerequisite for jobs requiring computer skills since they can be obtained in several different ways.
Not surprisingly, the use of computer skills varies across labor markets. In Frankton, several educators mentioned that many firms are still not using computers in drafting and machining; because of its agricultural base, Frankton employers have been slower to adopt new technologies than those in other areas. However, the trend is clear even in Frankton, and so knowledge of computer applications is quickly coming to be routine.
As we mentioned in the previous section, new organizations of work have tended to expand the responsibilities of individual employers and to blur the distinctions among specialized occupations. Individuals need a greater repertoire of skills than was necessary in older, more specialized and fragmented forms of work, resulting in the need for "cross-training," training for what used to be distinct occupations.
Within sub-baccalaureate positions, the need for cross-training arises in two dominant ways. One pattern is that firms combine several jobs or have individual workers carry out several kinds of responsibilities. For example, the firms that have a variety of machines, from relatively old mechanical equipment to CNC machines, must have operatives who are skilled in traditional craft skills and able to program CNC machines, and their repairers must be able to work with the electro-mechanical systems of older machines as well as the electronics of new machines. In business occupations, clerical workers perform secretarial and accounting responsibilities and need to know several different business systems and computer applications. In this pattern, the skills required are not necessarily more complex (though they often require employees being able to perform on computers); rather, each worker needs a greater number of skills. This pattern appears to be more common in smaller and less advanced firms which cannot afford the specialization which a larger firm could support; in these small firms, the boundaries among occupations are likely to be especially blurred.
A second pattern develops where firms expand the responsibilities of production workers to include communication with suppliers, customers, equipment manufacturers, and managers within the firm--that is, to take on more managerial and administrative responsibilities, including tasks that would previously have carried out by another layer of hierarchy. For example, a director of training for a Cotooli consumer-products firm--an individual who stressed the importance of communications skills--commented,
A good number of the technicians we've brought into the plant within the last two or three years who have two-year vocational degrees have clearly outperformed some of our technicians who had been here twenty or thirty years. We were shocked how many of the older people lacked in the area of reading and math--people who are our highest-level mechanics and electricians. [The newer hires] have been very strong in that they have these degrees, and their leadership skills have been much stronger than those of some of our technicians who have been here twenty or thirty years, who were told to check their brain at the door when they came in and do the same task for eight hours. And now we not only want people to perform tasks, but we also want them to lead teams and try to come up with improvements to move the business forward and so on. . . . You can be the best electrician in the world, but you need to be able to communicate and lead and be able to develop teams. . . . They can't communicate; they can't train others.
In these cases, as part of greater responsibilities, employees need communications skills, problem-solving abilities, and the initiative not only to identify problems but to take the steps necessary to resolve them--all capacities usually viewed as "higher-order skills," and different in kind from the skills required for routine production. These are situations in which prior on-the-job experience is not useful in developing the required capacities, and employers may find it necessary to retrain certain workers--for example, in contract education courses in communications skills or TQM.
In employers' descriptions of what skills are necessary, there is a contradiction that arises time and again in slightly different forms. On the one hand, employers value highly job-specific skills--skills which are sometimes too specific to be taught in education institutions and which must be learned on the job. They then look for experience in using those skills--one rationale for experience as the dominant hiring criterion, as we explore in the next section--and for educational programs that are as specific to their production processes as possible. One common criticism of educational institutions, as we will see in the next section, is that they include too much "theory" and not enough hands-on or specific training as well as general education components with no relevance to work. On the other hand, employers complain about the lack of general and "academic" capacities, including the abilities to read, write, and communicate in other ways; the ability to understand and apply math in unfamiliar settings; and other "basic" capacities that are more likely to be taught in more general school-based programs and in academic or general education courses; and some employers castigate occupational programs for concentrating on specific skills to the detriment of more general capacities.
Perhaps employers simply want their workers to have every conceivable capacity. However, a different explanation of this contradiction is that the skills necessary for entry-level employment are much more specific than those required for promotion and positions of increasing responsibility. In our interviews, those individuals who stressed specific skills were more often production-level supervisors, while those emphasizing the lack of more general capacities--"common sense," problem-solving, and other higher-order, less specific skills--were more frequently personnel managers and those who viewed the firm from upper levels in its hierarchy.[70] The same kind of division also emerges from firms of various size: The kinds of small firms who are more likely to hire individuals directly from community colleges and some high school programs often stress specific skills, while the larger firms who hire more experienced workers for positions of greater flexibility and responsibility emphasize more general capacities.
The problem is that the skills necessary in the short run may obscure, to students and educational providers alike, the skills necessary for promotion and mobility in the long run. If some employers press educational institutions to provide highly specific skills, then they may fail to teach those capacities which are crucial for promotion--as the employer cited above corroborated in complaining that schools developing entry-level skills suffer when "the educational level of things are always less than the high school level." What is even worse is that the job-specific skills that can be taught in occupational programs may still not be specific enough--as the overwhelming reliance on experience documented in the next section indicates. This leaves students from occupational programs in the worst of both worlds--lacking the specific skills necessary for entry-level jobs but without the more general capacities necessary for promotion over the longer run.
In reviewing the skills which employers claim are the most crucial, one striking conclusion is how unimportant the kinds of capacities usually learned in formal schooling are. The technical skills required on the job tend to be more specific than community colleges and area vocational schools can offer, and many of them can be (or must be) learned on the job. Certain capacities--aptitude and "common sense"--cannot be taught in schools and colleges, and the behavioral and interpersonal capacities (including interpersonal skills and motivation) included among "foundation skills" are often viewed as innate characteristics. Of course, general technical skills can be taught, as can academic capacities and computer knowledge. However, it is striking to see how many of the skills employers perceive as critical are not learned in school--so it is not surprising to find the role of formal schooling in hiring standards to be relatively weak.
[63] The term "foundation skills" has been popularized in the SCANS (1991) report. In that report, foundation skills include three categories: basic skills, including reading, writing, mathematics, listening, and speaking (which includes several dimensions of what employers refer to as communications skills); thinking skills, including creative thinking, decision making, problem solving, "seeing things in the mind's eye" (i.e., processing symbols, graphs, and other forms of information), knowing how to learn, and reasoning; and personal qualities, including responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity. There are some differences between the foundation skills of the SCANS report and the motivational and interpersonal skills mentioned by employers in our four labor markets, but the overlap is substantial.
[64] For jobs requiring "some college," thirty-four percent of employers rated "specialized knowledge" as extremely important, compared to ninety-five percent for dependability, eighty-four percent for proper attitudes, seventy-nine percent for being a good team member, seventy-two percent for basic adult literacy, and seventy-one percent for the ability to perform basic arithmetic. The results of this survey therefore corroborate our findings that behavioral traits and basic skills are much more of a problem to employers than are job-specific skills.
[65] See especially Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (1990), SCANS (1991), and a series of other commission reports back to A Nation at Risk (NCEE, 1983).
[66] One educator interpreted the emphasis on certain "foundation skills" as a cover for racism: The stress on communications skills works to the disadvantage of non-native speakers--and both Asian-American and Hispanic immigrants are numerous in the Palmdale and Frankton labor markets--as well as to African Americans who do not speak standard English. As a placement center director in a suburban community college within the Palmdale area claimed, "Employers say they want excellent communications skills regardless of whether the job really requires it. To me it's, in many cases, discriminatory actions." On the other hand, a placement official in a nearby community college related several stories of limited-English students who were dismissed because of their inability to understand directions. To verify which interpretation of the stress on communications skills is the most plausible would require careful ethnographic research, so this is a question we cannot resolve. It is possible that both views are true: that communications skills are more crucial in reorganized workplaces but also that employers underestimate the language competencies of new immigrants and cannot readily distinguish between those competent for a particular position and those who are genuinely not facile enough with English--and so tend not to hire any of them. However, it does reinforce a conventional conclusion about trends in the labor force: Whether inequitable or not, communications skills are an increasingly important job qualification.
[67] This individual provided several examples of individuals whose math skills in algebra and trigonometry were deficient to back up his contention of deficient math skills. He had been to visit a well-known local community-based organization that provides JTPA and JOBS training, an area vocational school, the local community college, and an adult school providing some vocational education, so he was more knowledgeable than most about local education providers. His estimate of 1,000 to 2,000 hours of training is high for some of these programs: Many of them range between fifteen and thirty weeks or between 500 and 1,000 hours if the program is full-time (seven hours a day); but several are part-day programs of about three hours a day, totalling 225 to 450 hours. A community college program might include several courses, each with about 150 hours of contact time; so a sequence of four or five courses would still total only 600 to 750 hours. An associate program would easily reach 2,000 hours, but the number of individuals completing associate degrees is small.
[68] These interactions took place at a focus group attended by eleven employers in the Cotooli area. Note, however, that the complaints about one-sided education in the school contradicts complaints from other employers about the incorporation of "irrelevant" academic material in community college programs.
[69] It is important to heed the warning in the ethnographic work of Darrah (1990, 1991): What employers interpret as problems arising from inadequacies among workers may in fact result from the disincentives and rigidities in production rules and work norms. In our research, we have had to rely on the reports of employers about necessary skills rather than on direct observation of workplaces, so our findings are precisely interpreted as what employers think about the skills required on the job--perceptions which then are translated into hiring protocols which are crucial to the relation between formal schooling and employment--but not necessarily as the truth of what modern production requires.
[70] Similarly, the complaints in many of the national reports have come from business representatives at high levels within their firms, not from production-level supervisors.