In an article in HR Dive entitled “How employers could improve job outcomes for young adults: Certain degree programs and on-the-job training could open access to high-demand jobs,” Anthony Carnevale, the lead author of a recent report and director of Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement, “Pathways to good jobs are especially strengthened through comprehensive policy efforts that layer effective interventions on top of one another.”

When education talks about “on-the-job training,” they are more likely referring to “on-the-job learning,” which is just a change of venue for traditional class or online learning. While important and necessary for preparing future and returning workers for the labor pool, too little time and discovery is spent on the employer’s role in developing the workers they themselves need to perform unique tasks for their operation. When a trainee’s core and industry-sector skills (industry-specific) are enhanced with task-based structured on-the-job training – by an employer’s subject matter expert delivered one-on-one in a deliberate transfer of expertise – the workers learning efforts prior to employment or concurrent with employment are preserved through direct application, before they erode from non-use.

Historically, employers have provided a tepid interest and response to the training process, relying too much on education to do the job only employers can do and relying on internal, informal, unstructured and undocumented one-on-one training to do the rest. This is partly because so much hype circulates around “new and improved” attempts by education to address the urgent need that employers continually voice. This may be, also, due to many employers’ denial about how weak and often ineffective the employer’s internal method of training new-hires, cross-training incumbent workers and upskilling incumbents for changing processes and technology are. Workers have been caught in a “Ground Hog Day” (I am talking about the Bill Murray movie, not disrespecting the little critter) loop for decades. Read More

Making it more difficult is the proliferation of paid influencers who have a vested interest in making a believer out of you. These aren’t just the social media types telling you how wonderful their product is, embedded with subliminal messaging to influence your decision to buy based on their representation of their experience. Since the rise of “infotainment,” it has been difficult to separate out fact from fiction, reporting from advocacy and trends from high-pressuring, yet subtle and crafty, marketing. Read More

Typically, the conversation changes to classes that are offered before the realization that accounting will see it as a cost and veto the idea before it gets off the ground. Or, the manager hands it off to someone...knowing it will probably see the same fate. Even though most states have grant funds available to help employers pay the cost of classes provided locally and specialty training provided elsewhere, states are willing to provide funding to offset most, if not all, of the employer's investment to implement a true, documented structured on-the-job training program, as well.

Worker training – the “transfer of expertise” – goes on every day, with every worker in every organization. How many companies would you say harness the existence of this phenomenon that grew out of the non-existence of anything formal to “make the best of it?” Informal, unstructured and undocumented on-the-job training (“OJT”) is rampant; the employer’s support and commitment usually isn’t. Worker development seems to be the last thing on the minds of management when things are going well but the first thing to be cut during turbulent times; be it cutting training budgets, severely limiting time devoted to informal OJT, or inadvertently laying off individuals who served as ad hoc, informal OJT trainers because someone had to do it. Read More

“The debt ceiling is a limit on the total amount of government borrowing. First put in place by Congress during World War I, it was meant to give blanket authorization for the Treasury Department to borrow money up to a set amount.”

"The U.S. budget deficit is how much more the federal government spends annually than it receives in revenue during that same time period."

"The national debt of the United States is the total national debt owed by the federal government of the United States to Treasury security holders. The national debt at any point in time is the face value of the then-outstanding Treasury securities that have been issued by the Treasury and other federal agencies. The terms "national deficit" and "national surplus" usually refer to the federal government budget balance from year to year, not the cumulative amount of debt."

At the end of the second quarter in 2022, the national debt was about $30.6 trillion. Based on the second-quarter GDP of $24.9 trillion, the debt-to-GDP ratio was about 123%.

How did the national debt get so high? It is probably not what you have been told.

“Running a trade deficit is nothing new for the United States. Indeed, it has run a persistent trade deficit since the 1970s—but it also did throughout most of the 19th century. ...the U.S. goods trade balance as a percent of GDP (gross domestic product) from 1800 to 2018. From 1800-1870, the United States ran a trade deficit for all but three years and the trade balance averaged about –2.2 percent of GDP. Then from 1870-1970, it ran persistent trade surpluses that averaged about 1.1 percent of GDP. Starting in about 1970, the United States began to run trade deficits again, which have continued to this day. These shifts in the long-term U.S. trade balance appear to correspond well with U.S. industrialization in a global setting.” Read More

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