Remote Learning Damaged the Nation

Doubtless, you have heard about onshoring. You know that the administration enacted legislation designed to bring the jobs back home. It sounded like a good idea, even if it did not work quite as well in practice. 

And yet, as I have occasionally suggested, this assumes that we have the human capital that can do the work. We have already seen that Taiwan Semiconductor has cut back plans to build factories in Arizona, because it cannot find qualified personnel. It might even have to import workers from Taiwan or from China.

Unfortunately, the problem is not just linked to high tech. Across the workplace spectrum companies are having trouble finding and retaining qualified employees. One reason is simple. Young people joining the workforce today suffered a couple of years of remote learning. They did not go to school, and did not learn to function in groups with others.

We know that children who did not go to school suffered learning loss. At times, the learning loss was so severe it cannot be recovered. And yet, older children also suffered. And their new managers are having a devilish time teaching them basic work skills.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the problem.

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. 

This is very bad news indeed. The fall in productivity will hurt the economy. The inability to do basic jobs will gum up production lines and supply chains.

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.

Let’s see. If we are going to onshore, we certainly need more engineers. We also need better military recruits and more nurses. Unfortunately, for all the talk about how we are going to do this, the obstacles are formidable:

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. 

The result:

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

As for nursing, the problem is the same:

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. 

The problem is pervasive, especially among underachieving and minority students. But, most graduates of America’s educational system have been rendered dysfunctional:

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. 

At times, the problem can involve elementary people skills. Workers in call centers now need to take special instruction to learn how to be polite and courteous on the phone. Apparently, not going to school damaged their ability to function in social situations:

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.

And also,

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. 

And, of course, the vaunted American work ethic has fallen into disuse. Young people who studied remotely do not have a work ethic.

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.

So, working from home, not going to school, these have damaged large numbers of American workers, and have made them barely functional workers. One trusts that you did not imagine that it would be easy to bring the jobs back home.