Re:The threat of technological unemployment
by monk_e_boy on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @03:10PM
(#13265819)
It's really hard. I'm doing it at the moment. I'm a 40 year old man being trained up with a bunch of 20 something women for a job. It'll take a year and it is really hard going.
It was hard to get onto the course. I've taken a huge loan. I'm shitting my pants. I've got no idea if I'll like the job or be good at it. It's the biggest gamble I've ever taken. The stress is unreal. Most of my fucking hair has fallen out. My body is just falling to bits. It feels like my heart is either going 200% or 10%.
When I read posts saying "Why don't people re-train?" Its for the same reason you don't re-train as a doctor or a teacher or for the police. Because it's not what you do. It's not what you want to do. It's hard to change. It's a massive gamble.
I imagine if you have no qualifications it's even harder.
Assuming that is so, to my mind the salient question is "why?" That is, why only 10? Is it that the other 90 just don't want to be retrained? Is it that the retraining wasn't accessible to them for some reason (child-care, transportation, etc.)? Or maybe some of them started it but dropped out for some reason? Is it that they "couldn't hack it" or is that we don't really know how to retrain people properly?
I would hope there has been research directed at this, as it seems to me that we'd want to find a way to maximize the number of people who do take advantage of retraining, and who ultimately benefit from it.