Incentive Anyone?

Companies who are looking for qualified candidates need to change their strategy if they are not finding the qualifications those jobs require.  By doing so they will gain, not only great employees, but loyal employees as well.

"In a brutal job market, here's a task that might sound easy: Fill jobs in nursing, engineering and energy research that pay $55,000 to $60,000, plus benefits.

Yet even with 15 million people hunting for work, even with the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent, some employers can't find enough qualified people for good-paying career jobs.

Ask Steve Jones, a hospital recruiter in Indianapolis who's struggling to find qualified nurses, pharmacists and MRI technicians. Or Ed Baker, who's looking to hire at a U.S. Energy Department research lab in Richland, Wash., for $60,000 each.

Economists say the main problem is a mismatch between available work and people qualified to do it. Millions of jobs with attractive pay and benefits that once drew legions of workers to the auto industry, construction, Wall Street and other sectors are gone, probably for good. And those who lost those jobs generally lack the right experience for new positions popping up in health care, energy and engineering.

Many of these specialized jobs were hard to fill even before the recession. But during downturns, recruiters tend to become even choosier, less willing to take financial risks on untested workers." -- Associated Press

So, you can see, a strategy shift is in play. Why don't these companies, who are looking for qualified candidates, pay a lower wage in the beginning, utilizing the rest of what they were going to use in salary to educate and train the employee(s) they need, in the way they need. They ought to utilize a contract and the incentive of higher pay following the education and/or training to entice those prospectively fabulous employees?

Recession Proof Jobs

"FBI Seeks More Geeks
January 9, 2009: The U.S. FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) is on another hiring binge. With 30,200 employees (40 percent of them "special agents"), the FBI is looking for another 850 special agents, and 2,100 other specialists with scarce skills. With a recession going on, this is a good time to be recruiting computer specialists, although Arab linguists are still hard to find. But even the recession is even putting a few Arabic translators out of a job.
All this is in support of the war on terror, and also to replace the growing number of baby boomers who are retiring. The FBI is eager to increase the proportion of agents and support personnel possessing more foreign language and computer skills. This is critical as the FBI stations more personnel overseas. For nearly 70 years, the FBI has had a presence overseas. While the CIA was created half a century ago to specialize in collecting intelligence overseas (and is forbidden by law from doing that in the United States), the FBI always maintained some presence abroad. Even before September 11, 2001, the FBI was sending more agents overseas as part of domestic counter-terror operations. Currently, there are over 200 FBI personnel stationed overseas, in nearly fifty countries. The FBI usually operates out of the local U.S. embassy.

Back home, the FBI is responsible for detecting and defeating large scale computer crime operations. This is becoming a larger and larger responsibility, and the Bureau wants more people qualified to hunt down the cyber criminals, and build a criminal case against them." -- Strategy Page