Is There Really a Skills Shortage?

Some people say there’s a shortage of skills. That’s sort of true. It depends how literally you think about skills. There are so many kinds of skills. My co-worker Todd Raphael, who is the former editor of ERE, was a state champion in Spanish as a kid. But he could barely speak Spanish! You can be a good language reader, speaker, writer, conjugator of verbs, memorizer of vocabulary words, and so on. Likewise, I know people who can cook. But what does that mean? Do you cater at a hotel for 1,000 people? Do you cook vegan food, vegetarian, Szechuan, barbecue on a grill, or bake pastries?