Skill and Meta-skills for the Unemployed

In an interview with Michel Martin of NPR's Tell me More, Barbara Ehrenreich entertained questions on her recent op-ed in the LA Times Trying to find a job is not a job I found her opinions refreshingly nonconventional. However, her answer to the concluding question, one that by that time sounded like the pre-revolutionary What is to be Done, seemed a bit disingenuous. Ms. Ehrenreich lamented that most laid offworkers have well-developed skills and that those skills are going to waste in haphazardly selected retraining programs. Besides the fact that this sounded more like a (valid!) complaint than an answer, the grievance ignores its likely cause, namely, that is precisely the plummeting demand for those skills that has spurred layoffs in the first place. And in many cases this is the continuation of a trend, largely driven by the globalization of our economy, that our current recession has all but exacerbated. This is particularly true formanufacturing jobs. Ms. Ehrenreich mentioned the skills of a welder. Most cost-cutting manufacturers would offshore a welding job to some workshop in developing countries where it can lead to a product whose final cost is a fraction of the cost of employing a local welder. What to do then so as not to waste Mr. Welder's experience? Perhaps the answer is to smartly select retraining. In other words, orient our local manufacturing workers toward retraining courses that build on existing experience rather than in a completely different and unrelated area. At the same time, it is probably advisable that the training lay out some general foundation that could serve as the springboard for further training down the road. A few years ago, advising Mr. Welder to become an expert in the maintenance of welding robots would have seemed surefire. The current slump in car manufacturing makes it likely the demand for such new expertise is going to collapse if it has not already done so. This suggests paradigm shift in the workplace: from the expectation of a job in which a given skill set would be employable for life to life-long learning a re-qualification that gradually builds on prior experience. The most valuable skill of today's worker is effective stewardship and development of her/is skills.