> I wonder why these companies don't try and emulate something like what a military does: take in the willing and motivated, give them all the basic skills valued by the organization, asses their existing capabilities, and then place them where needed after more targeted training.
This was how many German giants operated. You got in with 16 as a trainee/apprentice and rose up the ranks.
The problem is, employers risk taking up duds with that, and paying the fees for the dual-education schools ("Berufsschule") and exams isn't cheap either, so they went for requiring university degrees as a proxy instead. Bonus effects for employers:
- the government picked up the tab on running the university, which means that employers can save on that as well and only provide new hires organization-specific knowledge
- you can't be a complete moron if you managed an academic degree
- it weeds out normally-protected classes such as people with mental health issues or, frankly, poor and immigrant people as well because belonging to either (or multiple) of these categories is closely correlated with lower success ratios in academia.
Nowadays, almost all the apprenticeship trainees come from small tradespeople-style companies, at a lot of expense to them, and the big companies come in and sweep the freshly exam'd people with sometimes twice or thrice the tradespeople's wages. Understandably the small companies are pissed at that, but they can't do anything.
heh, funny you should bring that up as I grew up in Germany. I hadn't realized the Berufsschule system has become so discarded. But what you point out would (and does) plague a military as well if it wasn't A) a fully-funded state enterprise and B) traditionally required to be large and self-sustaining enough to have jobs that even the duds would be useful at. Needless to say a Google would not be able to squirrel the duds away so easily.
This was how many German giants operated. You got in with 16 as a trainee/apprentice and rose up the ranks.
The problem is, employers risk taking up duds with that, and paying the fees for the dual-education schools ("Berufsschule") and exams isn't cheap either, so they went for requiring university degrees as a proxy instead. Bonus effects for employers:
- the government picked up the tab on running the university, which means that employers can save on that as well and only provide new hires organization-specific knowledge
- you can't be a complete moron if you managed an academic degree
- it weeds out normally-protected classes such as people with mental health issues or, frankly, poor and immigrant people as well because belonging to either (or multiple) of these categories is closely correlated with lower success ratios in academia.
Nowadays, almost all the apprenticeship trainees come from small tradespeople-style companies, at a lot of expense to them, and the big companies come in and sweep the freshly exam'd people with sometimes twice or thrice the tradespeople's wages. Understandably the small companies are pissed at that, but they can't do anything.