Skill Is Secondary in This Tight Market

Attention job applicants: Don’t hesitate to apply for that position because you lack the necessary experience. In today’s tight labor market, many employers will hire you if you just express a willingness to learn.

In a 1998 national survey of 750 small-company owners with job openings, the National Federation of Independent Business in Washington concluded that “the severe labor shortage is a huge problem.”

“Fifty percent of the companies hired people for positions who were less qualified than they wanted,” said William Dennis, NFIB’s senior research fellow.

In another membership survey, the American Management Assn. in New York two years ago found “large gaps between the skills that organizations say they value and the skills they actually see in the incoming work force,” research director Eric Greenberg said.

Although 47% of employers polled said they wanted hires who could “effectively express their ideas in writing,” only 7% of new hires could do so, Greenberg said.

Asked if corporate America is lowering its job standards, Linda Davidson, executive editor of Workforce magazine in Costa Mesa, said, “Obviously, they have to be more flexible at the front end, and they’re spending more dollars training people coming in the door.”

Burke Stinson, spokesman for AT&T; Corp. in Basking Ridge, N.J., said the telephone giant has had to give new customer service workers extra training. “We found that if they have the right attitude, we can teach the aptitude,” he said.