First, the good news: Recruiters from 180 companies and government agencies were at last week’s Job Quest job fair, the strongest employer turnout at the thrice-annual event in four years. And they actually had jobs to offer, a solid indication of a recovering economy.
Now, the bad news: Increasingly, the job applicants are falling short of the skills needed for the openings, due to lack of necessary training or experience.
Clearly, more needs to be done to better sync the quantity of available jobs with improved quality of candidates — and part of that entails training or retraining.
It means job seekers must enhance their hireability by researching where the jobs are, seeing which might be a good fit, and polishing or acquiring the skills needed to make a switch.
Some of that seems to be happening, evidenced by skyrocketing enrollment at higher-learning institutions nationwide, and Hawaii is no exception.
This semester, enrollment in the University of Hawaii system hit a record high with 60,633 students, 114 more than last fall’s record. While enrollment at UH-Manoa remained about the same, the newly expanded UH-West Oahu in Kapolei gained students, as did Kauai, Leeward and Windward community colleges.
Many are returning to school to build on skills or retrain for new professions, and a rise in online courses makes them particularly popular for nontraditional students unable to make day classes.
For job seekers, it’s imperative to ward against skills atrophy and to tailor new talents to where the jobs are. Participants at Tuesday’s Job Quest got some important tips in that area: For the first time in the event, employers briefed large groups of job seekers on industries that are hiring, jobs hardest to fill and how to acquire skills for those positions.
Knowledge is a crucial component; so, too, is work experience that can come from apprenticeships and on-the-job training, especially in a new field. A few states have launched initiatives that allow such training while the worker is technically still unemployed, and such ideas are worth exploring here.
New Hampshire, for example, has gotten deserved publicity for its Return to Work program, which allows people to continue receiving unemployment benefits while in a training program of up to six weeks with a participating employer. In what proponents call a "win-win" situation, the initiative has attracted more than 400 businesses that train but are not obligated to hire the trainee; still, companies get the opportunity to preview potential hirees.
Georgia Works is a similar program, allowing temporary workers to retain unemployment benefits while getting some on-the-job-training; it even pays a weekly stipend.
Though such programs don’t automatically create more jobs, the big plus is the work experience and the valuable training in new skills they provide job seekers — without the loss of sometimes-critical unemployment benefits.
A new jobless report out Thursday showed Hawaii’s unemployment rate falling to 6.1 percent in August from 6.3 percent in July, the lowest level in more than three years. But numbers can be deceiving, with experts attributing part of the drop to discouraged job seekers who simply gave up looking. They say a truer indicator, which factors in the underemployed and the discouraged, puts Hawaii’s jobless rate at 14.8 percent, just below the 15.3 percent national average.
Such sobering context on people’s livelihoods adds impetus to improving hireability. It’s now clear that a skills gap exists — and equally clear that a stronger emphasis on work-force development is needed in order to bridge, then narrow, the jobless gap.
