OpEd Corner

…On the "You Train, I'll Hire" Philosophy

by Vern R. Johnson

In today's global marketplace, engineering products and services must be of high quality or they cannot compete. Today's competition demands that products and services not only are better, but that they arrive at the marketplace faster and are less expensive than competitors' goods and services. To succeed, competing companies constantly re-engineer manufacturing processes to deliver their products and services better, faster, and cheaper. They eliminate all process elements that don't add value to the customer, thereby improving product quality, process time, and overall cost.

Because good process reengineering efforts improve all three of the ingredients of a competitive product, corporations would be foolish - at least in the short term — if they didn't invest in them. But when they make these adjustments — and companies all over the world do this regularly — employees' skills become outdated, and employees lose career stability.

And when employees' skills are so out of date that they can no longer design products that compete with the best available; when they can't demonstrate that they add value for their customers all day every day; or when their salaries are higher than those of peers with comparable skills — anywhere in the world — they no longer meet the re-engineering criteria and their jobs become vulnerable.

As existing technologies become obsolete and are replaced by new ones, employees' skills must be updated through retraining. In the past, employees assumed that it was their employer's responsibility to determine what training was needed and then to provide it. But many corporations have learned that it is more efficient to hire new employees with the needed skills than retrain their present employees. So rather than retrain, employers simply lay off those they determine to be "unproductive."

In this regard, it seems that many American companies want a free ride in the employee training area. In fact, it seems they have embraced the operational philosophy that was so well stated by Lester Thurow: "You train, I'll hire."*

* Thurow, L., "Building Wealth: the New Rules for Individuals, Companies, and Nations," The Atlantic Monthly, pp. 57-69, June, 1999.

Vern R. Johnson is Associate Dean Of Engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Ariz., and is IEEE-USA's Career Activities Editor. This article is adapted from materials in his book, Becoming a Technical Professional (Casas Adobes Publishing, Tucson, Ariz., 2000). For more information, go to http://www.dakotacom.net/~capublish.