WALL STREET JOURNAL: Meet The Unemployable Man.

UPDATE: On Facebook, Alex Lightman suggests that if you’re unemployed or underemployed, you take advantage of these free online business courses from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Meanwhile, also via Alex, here’s a list of MIT’s most popular free online courses. Alas, this won’t help those who aren’t well-enough educated to benefit from this level of course.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

I had to laugh when I read this article. I especially liked this one tidbit, “…there will be some jobs for workers without much education, for the plumbers, electricians and software technicians. But not enough to go around.”

I would hope to remind the pompous ass who wrote this that electricians and plumber’s require more real (i.e. math skills, reading comprehension, etc.) education, go through more thorough training and must pass far more difficult examinations for professional competence & certification than any journalist. Which, by the way, is an occupation, not a profession.

Presently this country is facing a skills crisis because many of those skilled tradesmen & women who were the centurions of industry when this country was really great, are aging and retired or on the brink of it. When that institutional memory is lost we will not get it back because we have an education establishment that no longer values technical skills and has abandoned an entire generation of young people. As Dr. Ken Ryan at Alexandria Technical College has said, “We have duped ourselves into believing we can build a sustainable economy without the durable manufacturing activities that characterize those nations threatening to eclipse us.” So very true. I have been thinking and saying that, though not so succinctly, for years.

Nor industry without fault in this evolving debacle. in their never ending pursuit of short term profit for stock holders skilled employees have been devalued and made a commodity.

So ask yourself, when you are trying to add that room, repair leaky pipes, find the short in the wiring or fix the flood damage in your home, who do you want doing it? That Columbia School of Journalism major or that electrician, plumber, carpenter without much ‘education’? Furthermore, I’ll bet those tradesmen/women would do better a writing a story for the WSJ than that ‘journalist’ would at actually making anything.

Fortunately, the internet is rapidly making Mr. Wessel’s remaining time as a member of the employed, shorter, I hope.

Ouch.