It's a Training Gap, Not a Skills Gap

Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that companies have trouble finding qualified applicants. (For example, there’s a shortage of welders.) Across the broader economy, though, the data do not hold up. Annual wage increases have been stuck at around 2 percent; they’d be rising much faster if there were a shortage of qualified workers.

Something is clearly broken in the labor market. The problem may not be the skills workers ostensibly lack. It may be that employers’ expectations are out of whack.