SKILLED JOBS GO UNFILLED

[Paper Boy]

A revolution is playing out right before our eyes. Peter Gustaf has warned us for months now, since he took over as president of Wichita Area Technical College. Most of us are not paying attention, he says, and that has already cost us dearly.

In the 1950s, 60 percent of the American work force was unskilled labor. Today, it is 15 percent unskilled.

The technological revolution of the past half-century has made it so. What should have happened with such a dramatic change in the work force is a dramatic change in how we prepare our children for the world.

That didn't happen, Gustaf says, and now there are 8,700 unfilled jobs in the six-county Wichita area.

People still think they can graduate from high school and get a job, not realizing how skilled workers now need to be. Aircraft workers 50 years ago pounded rivets and twisted metal. That was a skilled job then; it's even more skilled now. And a considerable number of workers do many other things in factories, he said: carry around laptops, wear white lab coats, run machines that need adjustments done by a human who knows not only basic math but also algebra.

Plumbers and people who make countertops use tools that use microchips; they need to be more skilled than plumbers and countertop makers of the past.

Cars now operate with computers so complex that it would have startled the astronauts who used the primitive computers that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. The mechanics who repair those cars have had to adjust accordingly, making themselves more skilled, more technologically savvy.

But schools and society haven't paid enough attention, Gustaf said. Kids still come out of school thinking car repair might be easy to learn. It was never easy, and it's harder now.

As a result, bosses can't find enough nurses, aviation workers, plumbers or air-conditioning techs to fill open jobs.

Moreover, unskilled jobs no longer support a family, like they did in the 1950s.

"And if you want to understand why it is that about a third of the people going to food pantries now are employed people, that's part of the reason," Gustaf said. "Unskilled jobs don't pay enough anymore."

Part of the problem, he said, are public schools.

"They are still stuck in the 1960s," he said. "They are still teaching to what the work force was then, and what they are turning out bears little relationship to what the work force looks like now.

"Schools still teach you to go to college or go to (unskilled) work with only a high school degree."

His criticism might seem a little unfair, he admitted. Schools, after all, need to give kids a well-rounded education including liberal arts, while technical education is much more specialized. And the schools do teach some technical education. Wichita Area Technical College leaders visited Wichita schools Wednesday as part of a Kansas Department of Commerce tour and saw "some pretty cool things" in technical education, said Helen Thomas, WATC's marketing officer.

But overall, Gustaf said, the schools need to reorganize. And kids should rethink whatever assumptions they hold about job prospects.

Public schools' struggle

School officials point out that they are far from clueless about this. About 9,000 Wichita high school students, or about 72 percent, take some career or technical education classes. They volunteer for these classes; career and technical education courses are electives.

Wichita schools have begun to look hard at what they need to offer students in terms of technical education, said Jim Means, executive director of secondary career and technical education.

"We are constantly working with the resources that we have, and with our partners in the business community, to monitor programs," Means said. "We know what we have to do, and we'll be exploring a lot more in the future."

He said more could be done, though -- and not only by the school district. Some of the teachers who teach his courses have to teach some technical education but might also teach other things, like math. No Child Left Behind has become a huge issue in schools, he said; it demands so much of teachers' time that "teachers have a very hard balancing act trying to figure out what to focus on."

The schools are trying to adapt to the new job market, he said.

Denise Wren, the assistant superintendent for Wichita high schools, agreed.

"We drifted into thinking that all you need to graduate is 22 credits," Wren said.

One possibility that district officials have discussed is creating a technical high school that would focus on preparing students for aviation careers.

"What we need to do is figure out what skills a high school graduate needs now, and work back from that," Wren said. "We've never done that, sat down with business leaders and students and teachers and parents and figured out what they need. It won't happen overnight. But we'll do it."