Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.

“How do I do that?” asked the young man.

So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101. “You learn by doing,” he said. “These kids in school during the pandemic, all they’ve done is work on computers.”

The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country. It is one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

Talent First, a business-led workforce-development organization in Grand Rapids, Mich., is encouraging employers to stop trying to hire based on skill. Instead, hiring managers should look for a willingness to learn, said President Kevin Stotts.

“Employers are saying, ‘We’re just trying to find some people who could fog the mirror,’ ” Stotts said.

Since 2020, when the pandemic began and remote learning moved students out of schools and into virtual classrooms, the pass rates on national certifications and assessment exams taken by engineers, office workers, soldiers and nurses have all fallen.

Among the approximately 40,000 candidates taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam for work as professional engineers, scores fell by about 10% during the pandemic, said David Cox, CEO of the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying.

That means fewer engineers on the job and a lower degree of competency among those who make it, he said.

The sharpest declines in scores came on questions measuring the most specialized knowledge. Structural engineers failed to answer questions about the use of trusses in the construction of bridges and roadways, Cox said.

“These are areas that are very much involved in public safety,” he said.

Students in elementary and middle schools across the nation fell behind by an average of about four months during the pandemic after classes switched to remote learning in 2020 and stayed that way in some cases through 2021. On national standardized tests, the scores of fourth- and eighth-graders fell to 30-year lows.

Students who were in high-school and college when Covid-19 hit and are now entering the workforce didn’t fare much better. Despite lowered standards at many schools during the pandemic, high-school graduation rates fell. Scores for college admissions exams dropped to the lowest level in three decades.

Janet Godwin, chief executive of ACT, the nonprofit organization which administers the college admission test of the same name, said more high-school graduates today lack the fundamental academic skills needed for college and the workplace, with low-performing students facing the steepest declines.



In Covid-19’s aftermath, many college professors restructured curricula for students who lack basic study skills.

“Reading, writing and critical-thinking skills are not the same as they were in the past,” said Mike Altman, a religion professor at the University of Alabama who said he has narrowed his curriculum to give his students more time to master basics.

During the pandemic more than 100,000 nurses left the field, the largest decline in four decades of available data, a study in the journal Health Affairs showed. That has placed tremendous strain on hospitals and increased demands on programs to graduate more nurses. But students taking entrance exams to study nursing are scoring an average of about 5 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, limiting the number of students eligible to enroll in nursing programs.

More students who do enroll struggle to earn passing grades, said Patty Knecht, Vice President of Ascend Learning Healthcare, a private company which helps train medical professionals. And even if they do graduate, more are struggling to pass a certification exam. By then, they may already be on the payroll but unable to work. The delays cost hospitals an average of $42,000 per student who fails the certification exam, said Knecht.

Last year, Ivy Tech Community College, the largest nursing program in Indiana, embedded tutors in classrooms to assist lagging students with skills they should have mastered in high school. Some of the most basic included the math necessary to figure out correct dosages for medicine.

Joseph Mulumba, who is about to start his sophomore year in the Ivy Tech nursing program, was a high-school sophomore in Indiana when the pandemic arrived. His school was remote for a year.

“I feel like I would have learned a lot more if not for the pandemic,” Mulumba said. “When I got here I realized I wasn’t ready for nursing school. I realized I didn’t know how to study.”

Jerrica Moses, national recruitment manager for Senture, a London, Ky.-based call-center company, says new workers have problems with soft skills, such as an inability to deal with frustration. Senture, which employs about 4,200 customer-service representatives, has adopted a new set of tests to determine which prospective employees will be able to keep their cool under stress from angry or rude callers.

“Candidates who wash out respond by explaining how aggravated they get with the callers and then focus on the stress,” said Moses. Most of the people who struggle are under 25 years old, she added.
In Grand Rapids, managers at the John Ball Zoo are coaching seasonal workers in their teens and early 20s on basics such as why it’s important to look visitors in the eye, and how to make change at a cash register.

They are also trying to instill a work ethic in their employees that includes taking some initiative, getting off their phones and engaging with visitors, said Laura Davis, the director of strategy and organizational development at the zoo. Her young employees haven’t been held accountable for things like finishing homework assignments, and Davis believes that has led to a decline in motivation.

“They’re not looking to be productive,” Davis said. “If they’re not told what to do, if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing.”


The pandemic arrived when Ivan Schury was in the eighth grade. Now 17 years old and a supervisor in the zoo’s kitchen, he said the isolation he and his peers experienced over the next few years have left many distracted and disengaged.

Last week a teenager working the fry station kept wandering off. “He just kept walking away to talk to his friends at the counter,” Schury said. “I spend a lot of time making sure people stay on task.”


Charity Fields, age 19, stands inside the gift shop of the John Ball Zoo. PHOTO: STEVE KOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Charity Fields, 19 years old, works in the gift shop and says she is frequently surprised by the lack of motivation of her younger co-workers. A few days ago a 16-year-old fellow sales associate sat in a chair reading a book while customers shopped.

“I told her we weren’t really supposed to do that,” Fields said. The girl got up, stood near the cash register, leaned on the counter and continued to read.

The problem extends to the U.S. military, exacerbating pressures the services face from poor recruiting.

Army recruits aren’t communicating within their squads as well as they did before the pandemic, instructors say. Scores on recruiting exams fell 9% since the pandemic and prompted the Army to create a new testing boot camp to help recruits pass, a requirement for gaining admission to the military.


Army Secretary Christine Wormuth believes a lot of the struggles are tied into isolation that took root when students learned remotely during the pandemic.

“So many young people spent two years in relative isolation and not doing a lot of group projects,” she said.

Young workers’ struggles have become vividly apparent to Criteria Corp, a Los Angeles company that administers about 10 million assessments a year to evaluate prospective employees.

Results for test takers overall have held steady with a notable decline in the scores of men between 18 and 24 and usually with a high-school education, said Josh Millet, co-founder and CEO of the company.

The company’s Criteria Basic Skills Test measures reading comprehension, verbal skills and numeracy. Companies use it to hire for positions such as administrative assistants, customer-service representatives, medical assistants, insurance salespeople and bank tellers.

MEN UNDER 25 STRUGGLED WITH THE VERBAL SECTION OF THIS STANDARDIZED TEST
Which of the following sentences contains an error?

A. Halfway there, they ran out of fuel.

B. They began practice their piano duet.

C. This book is about sea creatures.

D. His business partner agreed to meet with him.

Choose the word that completes the sentence correctly.

Denise thought working with a reporter would be exciting, but she had answered the same question several times and was beginning to find the interview_________.

A. unique

B. repugnant

C. exhilarating

D. tedious

E. satisfying

Source: Criteria Basic Skills Test

See more...
Verbal scores for men under 25 declined by 11 percentage points over the three years of the pandemic. Scores for women were less dramatically affected. The biggest dips among men were registered in communication skills, reading comprehension, grammar, spelling and attention to detail, said Millet.

“Our customers consistently tell us that finding high-quality candidates is the single greatest challenge to the successful execution of their talent strategies, and it seems that diminished educational outcomes may exacerbate that challenge,” Millet said.

Cindy Neal, owner of Express Employment Professionals in Peoria, Ill., places about 1,500 people in jobs every year. Since the pandemic, she has seen sharp declines in the behavior of job applicants as well as their performance on employment exams.

The company has long offered courses for people to gain new skills such as QuickBooks. This spring they added new courses to help prospective workers with soft skills. Some of the chapters taught include taking initiative, personal productivity, cellphone etiquette, workplace hygiene, dressing appropriately for work and handling conflict with co-workers.

“This stuff used to be taught in schools,” Neal said. “Now people have to be told not to bring their kids to work.”

Results on the 15-minute employment exam the company administers to clients when they walk in the door are also declining.

Tasks on the quiz include recognizing misspellings in words like “availability,” “repetition” and “privilege,” and math questions such as: “If you were asked to load 225 boxes onto a truck and the boxes are crated, with each crate containing nine boxes, how many crates would you need to load?”

The scores in math and spelling are the worst she’s seen in 30 years, she said, adding, “I’m really concerned by the product that’s coming out of the school system currently.”

Write to Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com, Ben Chapman at ben.chapman@wsj.com and Ben Kesling at ben.kesling@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
Classes switched to remote learning in 2020. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the switch happened in 2019. (Corrected on Aug. 2)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/l...lls-new-employees-51

Yep. It’s a brave new world now out there

We have had several incidents in the past year that I’ve been involved in investigating where young new employees are bringing babies and toddlers into work with them, acting like it’s not even a big deal.

Saw a segment on Varney about this issue today. Apparently companies are spending millions of dollars training new hires in things they should have learned to graduate from college.

quote:

Originally posted by TMats:
Saw a segment on Varney about this issue today. Apparently companies are spending millions of dollars training new hires in things they should have learned to graduate from college.

On a related but slightly different note, I had an interesting conversation with an administrator at the local technical college yesterday. They stated that in a number of their skilled trades programs - stuff like industrial maintenance and HVACR - employers are swooping in and plucking their students before they even complete the certification program.

Basically, if a student is showing a little promise, they're snatching them up, employing them, and completing their training themselves.

So it seems like even in some of the skilled trades, some companies are preferring to do their own training rather than relying on them to learn what they need from the college programs.

One thing I’ve noticed too about the young 20-something’s today getting their first job, where I work a good number of the females dress VERY inappropriately for work IMO.

Skin tight pants and cleavage hanging out is the norm. It’s kind of ironic in this day and age of people losing their jobs for just looking at someone the wrong way. It’s supposed to be business casual but it’s far from that.

quote:

Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.

“How do I do that?” asked the young man.

But which college did he graduate from?

Those of us who have been hiring engineers for years know there are colleges that you hire from, and those that you don't.

We also know that if you recruit from a college, you simply MUST form a relationship with a few profs there who can give you the names of the best students. Also, if you can, try out a few as interns before committing to full time. Keep the best interns.

So the someone made a bad hire. They need to do better next time.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

One thing I’ve noticed too about the young 20-something’s today getting their first job, where I work a good number of the females dress VERY inappropriately for work IMO.

Skin tight pants and cleavage hanging out is the norm. It’s kind of ironic in this day and age of people losing their jobs for just looking at someone the wrong way. It’s supposed to be business casual but it’s far from that.

Give them a break. They probably don't have time to change into dress that's appropriate for their second shift job.

quote:

Which of the following sentences contains an error?

A. Halfway there, they ran out of fuel.

B. They began practice their piano duet.

C. This book is about sea creatures.

D. His business partner agreed to meet with him.

The answer is B, of course. It should read "They began practice they piano duet."



Y'know, I just don't care about their dilemma. Honestly and truly, I just don't care. I find myself saying this more frequently these days.

^^^^^^
LOL

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
But which college did he graduate from?

I'm gonna play Sheldon Cooper on this one...

The proper syntax for that sentence should be, "But from which college did he graduate?"



BAZINGA!!!

No one could express it before but we all knew by instinct that it was a bad idea to shut everything down. The ramifications ran so broadly and so deeply there was no way to predict how bad it would be for how long. But now, after it’s too late, we see it. Well, those with eyes to see, anyway.

When my son was in College they had to fabricate an all steel ball peen hammer on a lathe .

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
No one could express it before but we all knew by instinct that it was a bad idea to shut everything down.

This is more than that. They're talking about people under twenty-five, meaning that some of them were halfway (or more) through college when the COVID fraud was implemented.

No, this can't be blamed on school lockdowns within the past three years. This is symptomatic of the everybody-gets-a-trophy bullshit and the just-read-your-iPhone-all-day laziness. It's been going on for many years and the chickens have come home to roost.

And I don't care. As a matter of fact, I think it's funny. The old way of doing things was outdated and wrong, somehow, and this is what they get when things are changed.

You learn by doing, indeed.

These kids need to get off their asses. I'm lazy as shit, how do I run circles around people?

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
No one could express it before but we all knew by instinct that it was a bad idea to shut everything down.

This is more than that. They're talking about people under twenty-five, meaning that some of them were halfway (or more) through college when the COVID fraud was implemented.

No, this can't be blamed on school lockdowns within the past three years. This is symptomatic of the everybody-gets-a-trophy bullshit and the just-read-your-iPhone-all-day laziness. It's been going on for many years and the chickens have come home to roost.

And I don't care. As a matter of fact, I think it's funny. The old way of doing things was outdated and wrong, somehow, and this is what they get when things are changed.

Brother, you and I could have a month long conversation on this. What you posted here is exactly why Mrs DF and I are preparing for the gathering consequences of it. Coupled with all of the incompetence, corruption and slothfulness, we have a perfect storm developing that I don’t want to be near high population areas for.

quote:

Originally posted by selogic:
When my son was in College they had to fabricate an all steel ball peen hammer on a lathe .

Was my first assignment in machine shop as well… except not on a lathe. We got a vice to use and hand files! We were allowed a drill and bit to drill a starter hole to file out a hole for a wood handle.

Had a new hire that Graduated from an A&P school that didn't know what a Socket was or how to use a speed handle.

I can accept someone that wants to learn.

I'll launch your ass if you cant or wont learn.
You don't know how to run a lathe? Well sit down and this guy is going to show you.
"This guy" is someone I trust with their knowledge and skill, and I will reward them accordingly.
If they come to me and say "This one just dont got what it takes"
Well, I guess the kid is heading to the exit door.


That being said, I don't run a company. If I did, and I hired someone that said (s)he knows how to do "X,Y & Z" - being simple requirements for said job, and they don't? See ya!



I run a Tactical team of 10 Officers now, I've been doing Tact stuff or harder for damn near 70% of my career. I'm also pretty good at spotting talent and spotting a lazy dog, posers, and stupid. There's been a few Officers that asked to be on my team that just want to be here to wear T-shirts & Jeans, look cool, and reap the benefits of being in this environment yet not do any heavy lifting. The bad thing is, now, there seems to be more and more of the ones that want to look cool, vs the "heavy lifters" and "get shit done" crowd.

We've got a secret in our firm. We look for and hire engineering graduates that grew up farming. They tend to have great work ethics, are quick learners and are problem solvers. They work!

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

No, this can't be blamed on school lockdowns within the past three years. This is symptomatic of the everybody-gets-a-trophy bullshit and the just-read-your-iPhone-all-day laziness. It's been going on for many years and the chickens have come home to roost.

Absolutely. I've been retired for more than 5 years, so this stuff was going on way before covid.

As one of the "old guys" I was expected to mentor the younger staff, and I was happy to do so. Except that I noticed that they did not want me to show them how to do things, they wanted me to do it for them. After that, I found myself too busy to take on any more mentoring assignments.

quote:

Originally posted by chbibc:
We've got a secret in our firm. We look for and hire engineering graduates that grew up farming. They tend to have great work ethics, are quick learners and are problem solvers. They work!

In WW2, Boeing loved hires from dairy farms as they were used to working long hours