If people were willing to retrain, your concept might work.

But in all the cases I’ve seen so far, most of these people built their whole identities around being a coal miner or an automobile assembly line person. That’s the only thing they know how to do, and the only thing they are willing to do. Nothing less than the exact same thing will suffice.

In the case of widespread intransigence, I don’t see how you can solve this problem. Those people are going to be out of a job, in a career that doesn’t exist any more, having wrapped their entire concept of existence around something that simply no longer exists.

Yes, I agree that we as a society need to take care of them, otherwise we as a society will be paying a much higher price due to the problems they will cause.

We recognize part of this issue when it comes to soldiers who have come back home from war and are now trying to live during peacetime.

We need to come up with better solutions for people who have been obsoleted by the March of technology.

If people aren’t able to change and retrain, I’m not sure what will help them. I’m sure some people are locked in. I’m from a part of the country where people are pretty transient and it’s common to meet screeners who started at 50 or even people at 60 who started doing medical transcription or telework bank support and stuff. I meet tons of people who rebooted and I’ve been meeting them for 50 years or so. And it’s not like I seek them out.

This might also be an example where we have to teach and support and encourage resiliency early in life. I’m sure there are some people who lock their life around their job, but that’s not healthy. Especially if it’s literally a shitty and unhealthy job like coal mining.

don’t forget active denigration of anything but so-called “real jobs.” though i suppose denial and anger are the first two stages of grief

What skills are people going to learn in a week that employers aren't already willing to provide training for?

Are things so broken on the employer side that they won't take a 1 week risk on a new hire?

Having worked as a low level manager at places that are "metrics driven", what I have seen is that teams are given average metrics for the team to hit that are legitimately roughly between the output of a senior and junior engineer. What happens next is that when anyone below this average, i.e. all the juniors, it would show up on a graph and I would be tasked with "fixing" their stats to be above average. Rinse and repeat this cycle a few times and suddenly were not hiring any juniors or the job postings say "Junior" but describe a senior.

This is for software engineering which is a in demand field, I can't imagine how bad it would be for a field where there was a glut of people trying to apply

Yes. Employers regularly turn down applicants for lack of minor courses. Knowing how to weld means nothing to HR box tickers. An afternoon at joes upstairs welding school: tick.

I saw a kid not get a job because she hadnt ever used a fax machine.

I have a feeling that welding in particular is relatively resistant to meaningless certifications.

But it is a trade that was once taught by employers. They would teach the type/style/quality of welding they needed for the job.

What do you think they do with people that walk in the door with meaningless certifications?

They let them walk in the door in the first place?

I don’t think that a single week of training will prepare someone for a new job. I was thinking that it would be useful to check interest before spending lots of time in a longer program.

That being said it’s weird how many companies don’t pay for training, even simple stuff like LinkedIn Education and Coursera. So it would be nice to have more of these, especially curated, by a more independent source like a library or community college so it wasn’t tied to jobs.

There are also some great week or less trainings that can help improve performance. It’s surprising how many people can’t use Microsoft Office. I recently got to help people use Word and OneDrive and it was neat seeing how much work sucked before they figured out how to save files and edit files. This is someone that is simple to digital natives but a little bit of training can help extend careers.