&gt; The skills shortage issue, in my experience is the inability to find someone with the specific skills and talents for a given job. It is real, as anyone who&#x27;s tried to hire in certain areas can testify.<p>You know, you could always just hire someone with potential and put him through a training program to teach him the &quot;specific skills&quot; needed, or just let him learn them on-the-job.<p>But of course, employers are no longer willing to invest in their employees* , so we have a &quot;skills shortage.&quot;<p>* They used to.  It&#x27;s my understanding that the first few generations of business applications programmers were taught programming <i>from scratch</i> by their employers.