Why is it so hard for workers to find new jobs?

Photo caption: For Erin Smoot, who spent years working in retail, a confrontation with an irate customer during the pandemic prompted her to decide to go back to school. Credit: Erin Smoot. Article by Caroline Preston. The Hechinger Report – February 1, 2021. This story also appeared in Wired.

With almost 11 million people unemployed, the United States is ill-equipped to help them retrain and prepare for new careers

Saeed Shareef badly wanted to get out of the restaurant industry. Shareef, 30, had started working as a server a decade earlier, after realizing he couldn’t afford the price of a four-year college degree. He’d done stints at Buffalo Wild Wings, Papa John’s and The Cheesecake Factory. But the money wasn’t great, the work was unsatisfying, and poor treatment from customers left him increasingly fed up.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and Shareef was laid off. That’s been an all-too-common scenario. But what happened next has not. Shareef’s mother saw a TV commercial for a program that offered 12 weeks of training for technology careers, tuition-free. Buoyed by unemployment benefits, Shareef enrolled, and four months later, he started work as a junior web developer for a retail company in his hometown of Cincinnati. […]

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