ObjectivityIncarnate

correlated with a value of 0.11

lol, so essentially no correlation.

so “people won’t work if their needs are met” is patently untrue

It’s not true or untrue for “people” as a monolith. People differ.

Lots of people are happy to do literally nothing productive, if they could. And lots of people hate being professionally idle, so much so that they can’t stand not finding at least a part-time job, even after they’ve “retired”. At my current job, we had a 99 year old who was basically FORCED to retire (for the second time, she had ‘retired’ already, before she came to work here) by management, after she had a health scare at work. She was literally angry and grumbling about it during her retirement party, lol.

Different people are wired differently. Nuance is important.

Every single one of them I’ve spoken to about it says that their work is roughly 90% learned on the job. To me this makes the certifications and degrees they earned 90% worthless

This is not sound logic. Those certifications and degrees are the baseline, foundational knowledge that make it possible for the job-specific knowledge to be learned.

To use a simple analogy, you can’t do calculus if you don’t know arithmetic first. But in a calculus class, you learn ‘on the job’ all-new stuff. That doesn’t mean the ‘certification’ of knowing arithmetic is worthless–without knowing arithmetic, it would be impossible for you to learn or do any calculus.

We need an overhaul in the way we think about qualifications for jobs.

This is a self-solving problem. If an employer puts too many or the wrong prerequisites ‘in front’ of a job that doesn’t actually need them, they will deprive themselves of X% of actually-qualified talent and the business will be worse off, versus employers who place only the appropriate (which in some cases, can easily be ‘none’) prerequisite(s) that are actually required for the work.

Just steal 4Head

This is something only doofuses playing semantic games say.

“Unskilled labor” is a term with an established definition: it’s work that you don’t need special schooling or training beforehand to be qualified to be hired to do, and also generally means that someone who is hired to do it can be fully trained to do the work to a satisfactory level within a month.