Companies' training cuts add to jobless woes

— -- Companies have dramatically cut training programs for new employees, experts say, worsening a skills gap that's keeping them from finding qualified job candidates and pushing up unemployment.

Employers "want people to hit the ground running," says Wharton School management professor Peter Cappelli, author of Why Good People Can't Get Jobs. "They don't want to train anybody."

The cutbacks coincide with a 16% drop in federal funding this fiscal year to train unemployed workers vs. five years ago. As a result, the onus to enhance skills falls on financially strapped workers themselves. The jobless rate last month ticked up to 8.3% from 8.2%.

Thirty-eight percent of companies said they cross-train employees to develop skills not directly related to their job, according to a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). That's down from 43% in 2011 and 55% in 2008, past SHRM surveys showed.

An Accenture survey last fall found that 21% of employees said they've acquired new skills through company-provided training over the past five years. By contrast, employee training was commonplace in the 1970s, Cappelli says, with young workers getting an average 2½ weeks of training a year.

Particularly affected are manufacturers, which have pared back apprenticeships even as they're seeking multiskilled workers, says Michael Collins, head of consulting firm MPC Management.

The shift from extensive training began after the 1980 recession as companies became more cost conscious and intensified in the Great Recession of 2007-09. Firms also grew weary of paying for workers to gain skills only to watch them soon defect to competitors, says Susan Cantrell, an Accenture consultant.

With unemployment above 8%, many businesses "believe there's lots of (unemployed workers) out there that they can get," says Mark Schmit, vice president of research for SHRM.

Yet finding workers with the right skills is challenging. Seventy percent of companies have found it difficult to fill key positions the past year, according to a recent survey by Right Management. That helps keeps unemployment high.

Cappelli says this skills gap can largely be chalked up to employers' reluctance to hire candidates who meet most of their criteria and fill in gaps with training — a strategy they used to deploy routinely.

The behavior is short-sighted because jobs stay unfilled longer, which hurts companies, too, he says.