Facing skilled worker shortage, U.S. companies try to train their own new labor pools
1 min readArticle by Levi Pulkkinen, The Hechinger Report. PBS News Hour – July 1, 2021.
Arriving in Columbia, Missouri, at 18, Mateusz Haruza saw the University of Missouri as a stepping stone to a career in tech.
When the dean’s list student came out to his parents, they withdrew their financial support, and Haruza began struggling academically. He dropped out of college and started working at a UPS Store while running up credit card debt and stringing out his college loans. He’d hit “absolute rock bottom.”
Last year, friends guided Haruza to a fledgling IBM program that pays new workers as they receive classroom instruction and on-the-job training — no college degree needed.
That kind of recruiting was a relatively new solution for IBM and other companies that generally require bachelor’s degrees for entry-level white-collar workers. […]