The job training myth

“If only we could train Americans for the jobs of tomorrow, or better jobs already available to them today, we could solve Americans’ economic problems. Education and job training are the answer.” This sounds so tempting! It must be true, right?

I thought, once, that job training was the answer — I almost voted with my feet and started a vocational education company. In almost a decade of investing full time, as the founder of the first venture capital firm to focus on the future of work, I’m convinced that job training (as a solution to our economy’s failure to provide for so many people) is much less promising than all the attention it gets.

First, credit where it’s due: what’s true about the argument that we should focus government policy on education and job training?
> Education works! When people get a good education, they do better. If you can afford to go to college, chances are it will make you (much) better off.
> Companies should continue to invest in job training, for their own people and for others. Google just announced $100M more for training. Amazon’s commitment is more than $1B. Let’s encourage this!
> Startups can build wildly successful businesses by training people for new work. In fact, we’ve invested in several of them. (You can build an enormous startup without fixing all of society’s woes, clearly.)
> Individual people do have agency, and any individuals’ own efforts are likely — for them — to have a real effect. We also can’t shift all attention to “the system” or risk validating excuses.

Why is this belief, that “all we need to do is educate and train,” so pernicious? Because, if it were true, it would be great. It challenges zero notions of how our system works. It assumes that if all people have fair preparation, we all have a fair shot at success. It puts agency (who doesn’t love agency!) and responsibility into the hands of individuals. We Americans love to empower individuals. As we should! No elite has to give anything up and, even better, those who feel they bootstrapped themselves to success can enjoy the feeling that they’re enabling others to succeed the same way they did.

So why is it a myth, can’t we just train and educate everyone into better jobs? While job training and education are great answers for individuals, and for companies, they’re at best a small piece of how we solve our society’s economic issues.

We can’t just train and educate everyone into better jobs. If there’s work we need done, then training people to be able to do higher-paid work won’t fix the quality of work we need done. If we need millions and millions of restaurant servers, baristas, AI fact checkers, janitors, cashiers, home health care aides, etc. then any individuals who educate themselves into higher-paid work still leave the remaining work to be done by others. If we believe that “one job should be enough” and that we need people to do many kinds of work for which you can’t, today, enjoy stability and dignity (which is what working people say they want), then even in principle training and education cannot be our #1 priority for policy.

The “just get yourself some skills” line ignores the many other factors that prevent people from getting higher-paid work. A human being is more than a bundle of skills. Race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of discrimination affect people who have all the skills they need. When “just learn to code!” works, it feels like magic. But that strategy works too rarely for us to rely on that as a society-wide solution. The need for childcare, transportation, and a suite of other assumed “basic infrastructure for living” can prevent people from seeking or keeping higher-paid work. (There’s promise in programs that seek to provide people with relationships with those who might hire them, in addition to skills — apprenticeship programs, or non-profits like Climb Hire.)

If job training works, this is something that the private sector should be able to fund — and the private sector has always done more job training than the government. And, in fact, there are plenty of private companies that do job training (not to mention non-profit educational institutions).

Job training fails to change how companies hire. Too much focus on credentials, a poor proxy in practice, keeps many locked out of the system.

Bottom line: we’ve been trying education and job training as a top policy priority for a long time in getting more people to participate in the economy, and it doesn’t seem to be working.

So what do we need instead?

Some training, ideally by an industry as a whole, to keep workers at the top of their game and innovating, can be extraordinarily useful. Here’s how the carpenters and culinary workers train, a great model.

Beyond that, here’s a start: Create a higher floor (i.e., health care for all, guaranteed income, and higher minimum wages). Fund science, so that we can continue to have the long-term innovation that brings down the cost and raises the quality of goods. Remove obstacles to innovation in housing, education, transportation, and healthcare, critical areas of life that have not seen prices come down as they have in food, leisure, and other areas of life.

And, most important, rebalance power in our system so that working people can get a fair shake from the companies that employ them. This will probably require a different approach to labor organizing, and much more of it than we have today. (In my own work, I’m now focused on new models for labor organizing, because it can directly improve peoples’ lots, drive change in government, and cause disaster if its done in destructive ways.)

One job should be enough, and no amount of job training can fix that for people who do the work we need done.