The US is Ranked 12th in Talent, Topped By Those Pesky Socialist Countries. What’s Gone Wrong?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In an IndustryWeek article entitled, “Top 10 Countries For Talent,” it was reported that the IMB World Talent Ranking for 2018 placed the U.S. at 12th, behind many of those countries that are considered “socialist.” How can that be? Could it be that countries 1-11 found a better balance between a thriving model of capitalism and an economy that filters down to all?

It appears that these countries have deliberate strategies for sustained growth. They cultivate relationships with trading partners to “lift more boats” than just those at the top, and seem to do pretty well with their form of democracy. Their societies reflect this stability in the standards of living, mortality rates, health of their people, lower crime rates and lower numbers of suicides and mass incarceration.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the United States set a high bar for educational attainment, upward mobility, access to healthcare and income security during working years and in retirement. But by most of these measures, the U.S. has continued to slide embarrassingly backward – sometimes as low with some measures to what the world considers a “developing country.”

In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced the results of its 2015 rankings of 72 participating countries for the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test. The U.S. ranked as follows: Reading – 35th; Math – 24th; Science – 25th.

So it was really no surprise when it was revealed that the U.S. ranked 12th in talent in 2018. After all, in the last 3 decades the U.S. has transformed itself from the all-inclusive economy that served it so well – instilling ambition and innovation in generation after generation – to more of a “top- down” economy…with most of the accumulating wealth remaining at the top. To pay for that imbalance, capital has to flow from the bottom up, which whittles away at all of the measures that have meaning for the worker class. Obvious contradictions that emerge from a lack of long-term fiscal and social policy planning have maintained the imbalance for those who benefit from institutionalized ineffectiveness and counter-productive policies – the absence of which allow those in power to appear to be doing something while accomplishing little.

For example, it isn’t that the U.S. fails to spend a lot on education at the federal level as well as the state. It spends more than most of the countries in the world. “The United States spent $11,319 per elementary school student in 2014, compared with the OECD average of $8,733, and $12,995 educating each high school student, compared with an average of $10,106 per student across the OECD.”

In addition, it is estimated the U.S. employers spend $150-200 billion per year on worker training. Yet, the U.S. ranks 12th in talent. Since the U.S. has being struggling to close the “skills gap” for the last 35 years, it may not be a question of how much money is spent, but how the money is spent.

In European countries, exposure to career choices start in grade school. The student’s focus is narrowed to career fields of study in middle school, and honed in paid apprenticeships in high school. But it doesn’t end there. Anyone can continue their education at a college or university for free to move themselves into management – and all of this is with the cooperation of employers in coordination with local educational institutions. These countries have found that when employees strive, so do the organizations they work for and the societies and economies they live in.

In the U.S., education’s focus today is on STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) meant to build up a student’s relevant core skills, and efforts are being made toward bringing back the old vocational programs with new content. But while all of this goes on, the U.S. continues to operate without a coherent strategy that incentivizes companies to keep the jobs for which students are training here upon graduation. Many technically skilled graduates and workers attending college while employed in the U.S. graduate with crippling debt and settle for lower-paying jobs out of their field while their skills erode into irrelevancy.

The U.S. is attempting to increase the number of employer-sponsored apprenticeships, but it still finds entrenched resistance from employers who find it difficult to plan 12 months out – especially in manufacturing. The U.S. has become a net export leader of jobs that it creates with, in many cases, publicly funded research and development.

This over-applied notion of “creative destruction” may be useful to explain advances in technology, but is a poor excuse when explaining failure to maintain a strong labor base. Telling someone who went to college for 2 or 4 years of their life and incurred a nearly insurmountable debt burden to prepare for a career that their government encouraged companies (sometimes entire industries) to relocate to countries with cheaper labor rates is shameful. Government policies that encourage employers to bring foreign workers to the U.S. through the visa programs to take these same jobs U.S. students aspire to, to work for less than standard wage and benefit levels, is unconcionable – especially when they report record profits in the face of societal decay.

It will take a long time for the U.S. to find, and agree on, a better path. It first has to recognize it has a problem and serious-minded leaders have to commit themselves to solutions that reject close-mindedness to learning from models of workforce development that successful countries enjoy.

In the meantime, Proactive Technologies has found a niche in helping employers set-up and implement structured on-the-job training for ever-changing jobs. This infrastructure has been registered by employers as “accelerated” apprenticeships; low-investment requirement, high relevancy and return, low maintenance requirements. These programs are particularly focused on the tasks of the work that the job requires. Proactive Technologies provides the technical support and can manage the program for the employer so the employer can focus on business.

This approach also provides educational partners with real-time information they need to more accurately select related technical instruction and maintain it for change to keep the apprenticeship on-track. This fact-based and focused approach to worker development provides tremendous benefits for the worker, the employer and the community that last – some as long as 20 years!

If you would like to know how this approach might work at your firm or in partnership with a local institution, or how a pilot project may be the best way to introduce this approach to your organization, contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. A 13-minute promo briefing is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff.