Skills shortage a self inflicted wound?

For the past few weeks, you can't open a Canadian newspaper or business blog without at least one writer going bananas over the "skills shortage" paper released by the CIBC World Markets. However, Skills shortage a self inflicted wound from the Toronto Star asks some question about the role of employers in training workers to meet their labor needs, as well as a call to be less picky when selecting employees. Less picky does not mean giving up on essential character traits--reliability, conscientiousness, attention to detail--while tolerating and filling in some skills gaps--have HTML 5 but no PHP: we can deal with that--to find qualified employees.

Oddly enough, this month's HBR has an article called Who Can Fix the Middle-Skills Gap?* that calls on employers to step up to address this issue.

I also highly recommend Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It by Peter Cappelli which the author of the article also mentions.

*need subscription to see full article