48% of managers felt they are not getting the right skills – this is from one of the reports

I think the managers should be asking if they are looking for the right skills.

Rejecting a guy who has good visualizing and UX skills and who has worked on CSS3 but rejecting him just because he “knows” but has not worked on JQuery is ridiculous. So also rejecting one who has good analytical skills, data crunching capabilities but has not worked extensively in Accounting in IT industry  is bad. One needs a good Salesman. But then we ask for Salesman for Financial Products. Is Salesmanship not the key, if the Financial Products domain not learnable?

Why are we forgetting that the basics are important and rest are learnable (if the guy can and has willingness to learn).  How good are the guys in the fundamentals, like analytical thinking, coding, trouble-shooting, visualizing, systems thinking – these are important. Yes, then we also have to factor in whether the person has learnt new stuff, has applied new ways doing things to solve problems – making better pages or UX with better/newer technologies, whether he is comfortable using Accounting Systems as such, whether he is aware of paid marketing in social media and so on. The latter part evolves. No doubt and they are evolving faster and faster.

Laying too much emphasis on the latter and not so much on the former leads to two problems:

• there are too many people out there with these skills as they are new and then the Hiring Managers will say people are not available
• good people are being let go just because they dont have experience in the latter skills. They can be learnt in little time.

Many of the Job Descriptions are loaded with jargons on technology, tools and such. There is little emphasis  on the core.

Sad part is everyone knows the important distinction between the two – the essential of “core” and the adaptability to the “transient”.

Somewhere along we are doing that good job of giving the right things too.