Jackson Jambalaya

Lazy workers will remain lazy no matter what new skills you teach them. Most of the poor in Mississippi are lazy af.

But this will benefit those with the drive to succeed.

Been saying for 5 years that we need a short 8 week course in electrical, air conditioning, plumbing offered over a Summer at the Jr. Colleges. Most of these people don't want to learn about history, economics etc. they just want to go out and be an apprentice. This way they can learn on the job and maybe 4 or 5 years down the road have their own small business. Asking them to do a 2 year program just doesn't work now days.

There have been several initiatives to get Mississippi's educational systems to co-ordinate with State government and industry to offer such training over the last 40+ years. A few have succeeded in helping improve the labor force of existing businesses and industries that made efforts to work with the educational systems.

The problems are that our educational system are1) politicized and competes more than it co-operates 2)oversight in all but non-existent and boards tend to be " advocacy" boards, not " oversight and problem solving" 3) corruption in our State and the lack of laws to ensure fair competition in contracts or business discourages new industries and business from considering us.3) lax environmental regulations scare away those industries who expect the regulations to protect them from cut rate competition and 4) we don't appreciate what the needs for existing corporate employees are to get them to willingly move here.

Mississippi has had training programs in place for the past 50 years. Everything from refunding the employer half the employee's pay for a specified training period, to Community College on site and night training to even more millions being spent researching private sector needs and multiple ways to (attempt to) address.

Along comes a new hot-shot almost every other year to re-invent wheels and hold his hand out (aka Dickie Scruggs and the guy who wrote the above article).

Who says 'the goal is to raise individual incomes'? Of course that's the 'stated' goal of think tanks and so-called entrepreneurial wheel-inventors. If the workforce in this state (existing or upcoming) would take advantage of existing programs and opportunities, the ladder could be climbed.

As long as the vote pandering libs keep feeding people and giving them more and more free stuff, they will remain lazy, while sitting on their porch drinking 40s, while demanding more free stuff.

It is human nature.

Give a man a fish...

Vocational education is a great idea, but people must want to work and get off the libtard dole.

@8:59 - totally agree, most trades learn on the job, but a person with zero skills will actually slow a journeyman down, eight weeks is the sweet spot for someone to be useful and knowledgable enough to learn. My business would be much more efficient if I had good apprentice level folks supporting my experienced people - I could clear more jobs, more quickly and lower prices for my customers.

Wealthiest guy 40 and under (turned 40 this year, so not under 40 anymore) I know had crippling ADHD and dyslexia as a youth, got held back, the extent of his education is a high school diploma, a welder’s certificate, and a CDL. He owns a railroad construction and excavation company, is worth probably north of $20 million, doesn’t know shit about the Pythagorean Theorem, and doesn’t give a damn he doesn’t have a 4 year degree on the wall of a brand new office he’s building right now. Guys with college degrees are among his 60 employees. He knows how to bid a job, he knows dirt, he knows rails, he probably knows nothing about Renaissance History. We are pushing too many people towards 4 year degrees and desk jobs when there aren’t enough of those jobs to go around.

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.” –Thomas Sowell

@ Dr. Thomas Sowell
You are rarer than a leprechaun riding a unicorn

12:50 - You're cute, but you CAN NOT refute his comment.

And how many of these newly "trained" individuals will be able to pass a drug test. Good luck finding them now.

10:28 am and Dr. Thomas Sowell
We clearly live in a time when we measure a man's success solely by how much money he has.
10:28 am You and your friend don't recognize the Pythagorean Theorem at work when you see it apparently. I would think your friend's business has some need of engineering knowledge. Perhaps, he had to pay for engineers and lawyers when he might have been able to avoid the need to pay either.
What happens when you gain knowledge is that you come to see the larger world around you and how it affects your life. You can better analyze the risks and threats to you and your business or career including improving your judgment about those on whom you will have to rely.
Ignorance can bite you in the ass...your ignorance and those of employees and sub contractors.
Your friend sounds like my relative. He made tens millions too when a million was " real money". He saw no need for his children to become educated. He made all the same arguments you just made and berated his siblings for educating themselves and their children. He built houses for his children on his compound and had them working in the business early on. His children are struggling to pay the taxes on the compound and " killed the golden goose" and are trying a fitness studio and repair business to keep them afloat. They got " took" by the well educated and never saw it coming.
We as a society, may be about to find out just how dangerous ignorance and defining success by wealth alone is.

10:16, that was his own fault for destroying his family and not making them stand on their own two feet. Not everyone can stay out of higher education and expect to succeed. What we are experiencing is there are not enough people to occupy the trade schools fast enough and who are credible in their quest to actually become an asset to society. One commenter said a lot when he spoke of the gentleman who needed a CPA and attorney. If you are in business you need both. Only a fool would wear three hats like that. And I’ve never met a business person who never lost money. It’s a gamble, but one worth taking. One commenter mentioned drug testing, and boy that is a problem. There is no cure all but you have to start youth early with work ethics. Schools cannot.

Work ethic is not plural. You either have it or you don't. And it will never be learned in high-school or college. You develop a work ethic through observation of the world and others around you, preferably by witnessing the efforts of a mother, father, relatives and perceived role models. Nobody tells you to encounter those observations and you don't learn to watch by reading a book.

It's the job of all of us to put 'little people' in position to observe and encounter. It's not done accidentally. It's done consciously and with expectations. And, yes, we have and will always have those who have either a poor or really negative work ethic. It won't be reversed.

Look around and see just how much is being done to discourage a positive work ethic among the poor. Those poor whose positive work ethic is not driven out by poorly planned and poorly run programs rushes to the state line ASAP. Who can blame them?

Also WFD for state employees. This is critical to the success of promoting from within those candidates who have the necessary skills but not the credentials required by the state to move ahead. State employees workforce development organization should make more classes available for those state workers willing to push themselves for management or supervisory positions should they become available.