For years, career centres and corporate recruiters in the US have encouraged workers into signing up for retraining, or “upskilling” programmes, aimed at developing the technical skills needed for the high-paying jobs of the future.
But as rising interest rates and declining stock valuations helped cool the labour market, those touted white-collar job opportunities have dried up. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Meta collectively cut tens of thousands of tech jobs in recent months, leaving some graduates of upskilling programmes saying they are struggling to find work despite their new credentials.
On the Blind app, a messaging board where workers post anonymously, graduates of upskilling programmes warn others of their predicament. For example, a software engineer at American Express cautioned potential boot camp students against trying to move into the industry, saying it was already “flooded” with boot camp graduates. “It’s [going to] be hard to get into tech,” they wrote.
Upskilling has been heralded as a way for people looking to change or “future-proof” their career, and advance into high paying professions. Some 52 per cent of American workers participated in an upskilling programme in the past 12 months, according to a Gallup survey. Boot camps and online courses have sprung up to meet demand, offering training that is cheaper and faster than a traditional college degree in occupations such as software development, project management, design and copywriting.
But a slowdown in hiring for white-collar roles threatens to reverse that trend. The shift has left few jobs for upskilled workers to compete for, while employers in low-wage occupations including leisure and hospitality remain desperate to hire.
Employers in business and professional services — the category that includes many white-collar jobs — posted 21 per cent fewer job openings in June 2023, the last month for which labour department data is available, than a year prior. Openings in leisure and hospitality fell only 18 per cent over the same period.
“Job training is trotted out [as a solution to unemployment] after every major economic crisis and it has never worked,” says Gordon Lafer, a political economist at the University of Oregon who studies job training. “I don’t think there’s any economist in America who predicts more than a third of jobs requiring it in our lifetime.”
Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center, says that paid job training programmes faced little scrutiny until 2020 when the coding boot camp Bloom Institute of Technology, then known as Lambda School, faced allegations of inflating its job placement rate.
At the same time, the Covid pandemic pushed much of US life online in 2020, creating a jobs boom in Silicon Valley and increased demand for upskilling programmes. The number of registered users on Coursera, an online learning site, grew from 44mn in 2019 to 92mn in 2021. Some 20mn people signed up for Coursera in 2021 alone.
The upskilling programmes are the only options US workers have to change career without returning to college, says Hal Salzman, a sociologist and professor at Rutgers University.
“We don’t have a good back-up [to college] like the apprenticeship systems that they have in Europe,” Salzman says. “We don’t have a good non-college career route.”
But as hiring slowed last year, some workers began to wonder if these programmes were worth their time and money. The average coding boot camp costs $13,584 and lasts more than 15 weeks, according to Course Report, which tracks the industry. Students can also graduate with large debts, says Kaufman, who has studied the income share agreements some programmes use to allow students to delay tuition payments until they start working.
“I would say the modal outcome for someone in a boot camp is to be really really disappointed,” Kaufman says. “I would say on average, people end up pretty destitute.”
“I would also say that trying to get a job at Google or Facebook by attending a coding boot camp is like trying to become a millionaire by buying a lottery ticket,” Kaufman adds.
Upskilling programmes also do not receive independent accreditations like universities do, leading some to question their quality, as well as guarantees of job placement and six-figure salaries which some programmes include in their advertisements.
“Courses and certifications are not worth the [money] because they’re not recognised by hiring managers,” a product manager at food delivery app DoorDash wrote on Blind.
I would say that trying to get a job at Google or Facebook by attending a coding boot camp is like trying to become a millionaire by buying a lottery ticket
Ben Kaufman, Student Borrower Protection Center
Yet upskilling programmes continue to report that high numbers of their students are employed after their courses end. The Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, a boot camp trade group that compiles statistics on programmes, reported that coding boot camp graduates have an employment rate of about 71 per cent.
On Blind, some workers challenge those statistics. One wrote that in their class, most either returned to their old jobs or were hired for non-web development jobs at tech companies, such as in customer experience.
Proponents of upskilling programmes say they can help improve gender, race and socio-economic diversity in elite companies, by providing education to workers who might not have otherwise received it.
However, Lafer at the University of Oregon says that many of those workers likely would have found jobs whether they completed programmes or not, pointing to a 2005 study by the US labour department that followed the careers of 20,000 workers. Graduates of job training programmes had little to no career advantage over similar workers who did no training after four years, researchers found.
The exception, according to Lafer, are programmes sponsored by individual companies who have specific roles set aside for graduates.
“If you look at the two-thirds of the labour market where people don’t have college degrees and jobs don’t require them, things like having a union and having a higher minimum wage make a bigger impact than skills training,” Lafer says.
Source: Financial Times
