#workforce skills

[zooophagous]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[thisisgraeme]

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[johnsonrich01]

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[hotcinnamonsunset]

i was scrolling on linkedin (cringe) at work for 20 seconds and saw two separate ads pushing me to use ai to turn a selfie into a professional work headshot🤮

[isthehorsevideocute]

In honor of rodeo season I will post a *gasp* opinion.... the worst thing about rodeo is the nationalist jo session and the presence and push of military recruitment. The animals are fine. People will have you believe rodeo is a bloodbath and "as bad as bullfighting" . I can go into greater detail for anyone that wants to know the ins and outs of how rodeo works because I have some background in it.

[whentherewerebicycles]

man oh man i have so many thoughts about how insistently (and i think kind of blindly/uncritically) my university pushes us to frame absolutely every type of learning experience we offer to students in the language of "career readiness" and "career-connected learning" and "professional development." i totally get that we have a large first-gen student population who are making a big investment of time & money in a college degree and who want to be sure that doing so will grant them access to greater socioeconomic mobility. and i DO think it is important for us to think about like, ok, long-term, what comes after these experiences or after this four years in college, and what can we be doing to set students up for success as they transition out of college and into the rest of their lives. but like. idk man. i find it really bleak sometimes. just this relentless messaging that the only thing that matters in your adult life is how competitive you are on the job market. and i also think it pushes us to just like, kind of warp or distort the things we are offering students to make them fit under that rubric, or that particular framework for valuing things? like if we want to convince a student to study abroad we can't be like, living abroad is one of the most amazing things you can do. it's so fun/scary/exhilarating/awesome and it will expand your horizons in ways you can't even anticipate and it will expose you to different ways of seeing the world and you will get to interact with people whose perspectives have been shaped by totally different cultures & contexts and it will help you become more independent and more confident in your ability to handle unfamiliar situations and it will give you stories you will remember all your life and you will build strong friendships with the people you meet and you will take cool pictures or buy little knickknacks that remind you of those experiences in your daily life forever and it will motivate you to travel more and when/if you have kids of your own you will probably make it a priority to travel with them if you can or to encourage them to study abroad when they're older because you know how amazing that experience is and you want them to have access to those kinds of life-changing opportunities. like instead of saying any of that we have to say oh this will develop your skills in time management and project management and professional communication with your supervisors and it will give you something impressive to talk about on your resume or in job interviews and blah blah blah. or even if you use a more capacious definition of career readiness that focuses more on habits of mind (like, in the workplace you will sometimes have to navigate complex situations where expectations are not fully clear! you will also likely have this experience living abroad!), it's still just like... idk man... i find it so reductive lol like yeah sure but "get a skill that applies to your job as a project manager or an IT professional or whatever" just feels so much... Less... than the more humanistic appeal to like, this will enrich your life in so many ways, and you will, through these experiences, just become an all-around more emotionally mature, confident, and interesting human being who has engaged in an experience that challenged you and helped you grow. but then i am all in on the humanities and humanism in general so maybe i am biased here and someone who wants to be a software engineer or whatever would be wholly unmoved by that kind of appeal. idk. anyway. it looks like our team is going to be subsumed into our career center in the next year or two so like. what can you really do except to inwardly say "wow i kinda hate this"

[mimiyanna]

The worst part about holding a job for several years is seeing everyone you worked with come and go, over and over again, making friends with coworkers, or just learning to enjoy working with them, only for them to move on and leave forever.

[sonsband]

also I haaaaate the "disabled students need AI to compete" argument I see way too often.

like I am disabled, physically and mentally. and guess which one is more relevant to my career? is it (a) my GPA, or (b) my ability to think critically and construct an argument and analyze things? and which of those would AI improve?

answer key: b, neither

[eaglesnick]

“We can't deter people fleeing for their lives. They will come. The choice we have is how well we manage their arrival, and how humanely.”  -  Antonio Guterres

Continuing with my dissection of Reform UK's manifesto, this forth article is about the claim that "record mass migration has damaged our country".

It cannot be denied that mass immigration has had a significant impact on Britain, shaping its economy, society, and culture in various ways. Some argue that it has contributed to economic growth, filled labour shortages, and enriched British culture. Other's, like Reform UK, argue the opposite, claiming it has strained public services, kept wages down, contributed to housing shortages, and led to social tensions.

I have no doubt both sides in the debate are correct - mass immigration has brought both benefits and costs.

The right-wing parties like Reform UK tend to obsess over illegal immigrants, often ignoring the much larger proportion of legal immigrants, men and women INVITED here to help stimulate the economy and work in our low paid public services, especially in the NHS and social care. Net migration hit a record 906,000 people for the year ending June 2023. Of these 52,530 were illegal immigrants, a mere 5.7% of the total immigrant population.

The other 93.3% of immigrants were either overseas students or INVITED here by government and businesses. Personally, I don’t understand  why we class overseas students as "immigrants" in the same way we classify foreign nurses or care workers: the former pay to study in  Britain whereas "we" pay the latter to work here.

In the academic year 2022/23 there were 758,855 overseas students in Britain. The TOTAL  immigration to the UK for that year  was estimated at 1,218,000. In other words the TOTAL number of non-student immigrants that came to Britain that year was 498,145. That is still a big number but it is not as big a number as Reform UK would have us believe. Another omission by Reform UK is the reason we need immigrant labour.

The excuse business uses for their  mass recruitment abroad is that the British people do not have the skills they are looking for. The question then arises as to why British people lack relevant skills. Professor Brain Bell the chair of UK’s Migration Advisory Body states:

“In the last 10 to 15 years there has been a 27% reduction on how much employers spend on training and a 31% reduction in how much the government spends on adult education.” (BBC Today Programme: 29/11/24)

This has resulted in fewer and fewer skilled workers, which on the surface you would think was a bad thing for both employers and government.  But austerity obsessed Tory governments and tight-fisted businesses have been able to recruit cheap labour from abroad to fill the gaps. Businesses have not been training British people because it saves money for the shareholders.

This brings us to public sector expenditure and Reform UK's call, like the Tories before them, to insist that government make public spending cuts.

Tory government's cut nursing and doctor training placements because dogmatic adherence to neo-liberal economic theory dictated it cut public spending as much as possible. Reform UK is no different.

The Tories tried to divert our attention away from this policy by highlighting illegal boat crossings and employers have, understandably, remained silent concerning their contribution to record immigrant numbers.  Yet business’s made 453,000 work visa applications for the year ending September 2024, a figure eight times greater than those arriving illegally.

Reform UK doesn’t emphasise the role of business in increasing mass migration and neither does Nigel Farage take any responsibility for the broken promises regarding Britain leaving the EU and the claim that this would reduce immigration numbers. When asked on the BBC programme Broadcasting House (18/05/25) if he wanted to say “sorry” for promising lower food prices and lower migration during the Brexit campaign he blamed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove for failing to deliver.

Refusing to accept responsibility for his promises is typical Farage and comes straight out of the Trump playbook. It doesn’t matter if what you say is true or not. Providing you say a thing often enough people will come to believe you regardless of the truth.

Reform UK party officials are brilliant attack dogs. Once they have their teeth into someone or a particular group of people, then they don’t let go. They play on our fears and they provide us with scapegoats: especially immigrants.

Immigration does need to be controlled, everyone is agreed on that, but  Forage’s policy of net zero migration isn’t going to solve the housing crisis, the NHS recruitment crisis or the fact the rich pay too little tax. It will not solve the social care crisis or the crumbling infrastructure problem. In fact a policy of net zero migration is more likely to exacerbate some of these problems than solve them.

Worse, if we, and the rest of the world,  follow Reform UK’s energy policy and increase our consumption of fossil fuels rather than investing in green energy, then the climate crisis will worsen. Droughts, flooding, wild fires and famines will increase, and millions of people will be forced to migrate. Some estimates suggest that up to three billion people could be displaced by climate change by the end of the century. If that happens then we really will have a migration problem.

[sailoreuterpe]

I survived a week of visiting family, driving all over the fucking Midwest, narrowing avoiding multiple accidents (fuck cities and fuck city drivers). Now I have two weeks of training which culminate in a pass/fail test to secure my new position at the Post Office. I'm much more anxious and nervous than I thought, but everyone else has confidence in me. I just so badly don't want to be a failure.

[remyfire]

Trying to convince prospective employers of your important skills aka trying to convince yourself of your important skills so that you put them on the damn resume in the first place.

[hiimcanadia]

Okay that post I reblogged earlier has got me thinking and I feel like there might be some demographic info that people are missing when they say shit like "nobody in gen z knows how to use a computer" bc like. I am gen z. I'm 19. And me and everyone I hang out with all know how to use computers fairly well. I'm personally not an expert by any means but I know how to troubleshoot and use PowerPoint and Word and Excel and i know what settings to fuck around with on my laptop to make it look and act exactly how I want it to. I know plenty of people my age and even younger who can do all sorts of fancy coding and hacking and who could probably take my computer from bluescreening to functioning perfectly in like 10 minutes if I asked.

But also I'm poor and a bit of a nerd. The people I hang out with are, for the most part, also poor nerds. People who I have met irl who ARE completely technology illiterate are, in my experience, rich and preppy. I know how to use old bulky computers because when I was younger that's all we could afford and I didn't care about trying to get anything fancier, but people who are rich and preppy might have successfully begged their parents for a smartphone or an iPad as young as 10 years old. I grew up learning how to use computers because it was the best technology I had access to and I found it fascinating, while other people were able to access brand new technology and only cared about it as a tool that could entertain them with very little effort. And like, people who are rich and preppy are usually going to be a lot louder and more visible online than people who are poor and nerdy. That one post was from the perspective of a private tutor- rich families are going to be a lot more likely to have enough money to hire a private tutor than poor families. Same about that one post from the perspective of someone teaching a coding class, not everyone can afford to do that.

Obviously whether or not someone is rich and popular are not going to be the only factors at play here but they are the ones that I personally remember noticing when I was in middle/high school. There are PLENTY of gen z kids who know how to use computers, I think some of y'all just aren't looking in the right places

[nulfaga]

Btw please pray for me* that i land one of these little white collar jobs this fall and get paid like a human being for the first time in my ridiculous little life +_+. it would change everything

*in the colloquial sense of "spare a thought for me"

[johnsonrich01]

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[frances-kafka]

UNIQUELY 'Firstian: 'Firstians live their entire lives based on metrics and algorithms. If they have jobs at a fixed location (say, Amazon workers) they're essentially literally managed by robots because that's what's happening with the metrics, we just aren't really very imaginative about what a robot actually IS and ignore that Robbie got many of the jobs and became our middle manager long long ago. For the army of female workers at an average 1960s office, Robbie is the one computer that replaces all of them. 'Firstians are always downstream of metrics and algorithms and data, and may even directly report to machines if they have something resembling a normal "job" (which is not in a lot of respects going to resemble a 20th century job or set of employee/management relationships). Many don't have a middle manager "per se" just some kind of automated... thing... that tracks their metrics and automatically kicks them off the service if they take too long on a Dash delivery, and automatically fires them by form letter and locks them out if they take too many potty breaks at Amazon. Human bosses sometimes make exceptions, you can explain things to them. The robo boss only cares about data, and your relationship to it.

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