Guys, guys! I think the skills shortage might be an illusion…

Nicholas Bowick
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

If you stand in front of a mirror and whisper “Java experience” three times, someone from Accenture will appear in a puff of smoke and offer you a job. Spooky eh?

Anyway, cast your mind back to 2011. Dubstep went mainstream, London went riot-y, and my class and I were graduating from uni.

And we all wore these.

Now, we weren’t a happy lot. It was apparent that the fierce competition for jobs meant that about half of us would have to abandon the idea of working in engineering at all. Anxious classmates signed up to accountancy training courses, logistics grad schemes and law conversions.

Those that did land an engineering job would have to settle for poor pay, and count themselves lucky to have a job at all.

In short, it didn’t feel like our skills were in demand.

Skills shortage?

Fast forward to 2018. Dubstep is shit, London is riot-free, and I’m trying to help bring young engineers into my company. Candidates are… surprisingly scare.

I’ve spoken to some recent joiners on our grad scheme, and they told me dozens of their capable coursemates were unable to find a job. Yet none of their CVs are coming our way.

I think the answer lies in what I’m calling the “prior experience bias”. I lack the imagination to call it anything snappier. In the UK, engineering students tend to get placements or internships at industry employers for some experience over the summer holidays or over a term.

A placement was probably the biggest single thing you could do to improve your career prospects. A summer placement invariably led to a full-year industrial placement, which led to a grad scheme. Didn’t get a placement? Kiss that career goodbye, sucker!

“Oh, sweet, I got an internship at Airbus”

This meant your fate was sealed years before graduation. I got my golden ticket for a placement in 2009, and sure enough it secured me a grad scheme in 2011. I saw cleverer and more capable course mates miss their spot on the placement-wagon, never to be seen in the industry again. I’m pretty sure my success was mostly down to luck, rather than merit. And worse, some relied on connections or, dare I say, nepotism to get that first big company on their CV.

Employers ensure that their hiring process is fair and ethical, but the problem is that the unfair advantage creeps in years before that first interview. It’s not deliberate or malicious — everyone’s just trying to get a job. But as an employer, we need to be aware that our “talent pipeline” (eugh, buzzword) isn’t a very fair environment.

Sports Day!

This sort of thing happens anywhere where a year group is assessed relative to itself (i.e. the best in each year group are selected until a quota is filled, without any cross-checking over the different year groups).

In sports, people born towards the start of the school year are markedly more likely to end up on professional athletics programmes. That’s because the oldest kids in each year tend to be taller than their peers, and get picked first for sports. This creates a vicious cycle, where the oldest kids in the year group get increasingly trained and favoured. This effect persists into adulthood, long after the actual advantage has disappeared.

Are we doing the same thing? If we interview grads because they have that big industry name on their CV, are we perpetuating that initial, lucky headstart?

I think we are, because that’s what happened to me.

What about the others? The capable grads that can’t name-drop a big employer – why aren’t we hiring them? Peter Cappelli, Professor of Management at The Wharton School argues that employers are slowly creeping away from the expectation of having to train new hires, and instead insist that candidates must have all the requisite skills before starting. In engineering, this sets the bar artificially high, and reinforces our reliance on the small pool of grads with directly relevant placement experience.

This means that the student with one week of experience in Javascript will be headhunted and by every recruiter from Accenture to Zipcar, while a thousand other good grads don’t even make it through the pre-screening.

Like the sporty kid born in September, the effect of a few weeks headstart will bias a whole career.

Job specs written by Franz Kafka

If we don’t build an allowance for training in our (often proprietary) tools and processes, we create inflated, pedantic job specs that only a demi-god could meet. And if that demi-god does show up, they’ll want a lot more than a graduate salary.

This deadlock creates the illusion of a skills shortage. Skilled grads are hidden from employers by a totalitarian screening process. Then frustrated employers turn to the media to complain about the shortage of skilled grads.

Reddit is awash with impossible examples of employers demanding eight years experience in software that’s only existed for three. Or demanding two years experience before considering you for an unpaid internship. Or the prizewinning 57 year-old author rejected for a junior publishing job because she “lacked experience”.

It’s no wonder that “millennial disloyalty” is now a corporate trope. When well-intentioned jobseekers are made to run a gauntlet of discredited tests and broken automation so surreal it would make David Lynch blush, it’s no wonder they simply play the system. When you’ve already been “ghosted” by fifty employers, it’s hard to think of a reason not to do a little ghosting yourself.

The secret pool of overlooked grads

Right, let’s move on — how do we fix this? First, those crazy-specific demands on previous experience? Drop ‘em. Demanding insider knowledge from someone fresh out of uni is silly at best, and unethical at worst. It institutionalises inequality and drives inefficiency into the job market. Plus, a few months of prior experience just won’t make a difference in the long run.

Instead, we should focus on qualifications, attitude and ability. There’s loads of keen grads out there that have that. And there’s plenty of research showing that a verbal interview about previous experience just isn’t a very good indicator of future performance.

Next, accept that training is a natural and necessary part of bringing on a fresh recruit. Grads are cheap for a reason, and if you want someone who already knows all about the job, you need to hire (and pay for) a senior engineer instead.

We can remove a whole load of unhelpful barriers from our process without compromising on quality. I’m not advocating for a drop in standards — not at all. Like a lean production line that cuts out waste, it’s about identifying where the value in the process really is.

Employers that can adjust their thinking might discover that they’re not facing a skills shortage after all. They might find they have access to a much larger pool of talent than they realised.

A capable, enthusiastic pool of talent that’s been systematically overlooked by competitors…

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