The guidance counsellor is out to lunch

A few years ago I was reading something about a Louisiana shipyard, and the story mentioned in passing that the Northrop corporation was bringing in overseas workers for the skilled trade jobs because they couldn't find American workers.

Damned capitalist jackals, I thought. Yet one more example of corporate America's abhorrent and never ending campaign to screw labor.

Did a little digging. Northrop not only tried to find local trades, they even set up a training program at one of the regional tech colleges. It was a dismal failure. For every applicant with the basic math and literacy skills required to learn a trade, they'd get a hundred who had no idea how to show up on time, how to study, and no familiarity whatsover with the concept of doing a days work.

I am reminded of this by a job ad in the paper today. ThyssenKrupp is looking for an elevator mechanic for their Newfoundland operations. Who even knew they had elevators in Newfoundland? Apparenly they do, but they don't have anyone to service them. Hence the nation wide search. Good luck to them.

When I was a highschooler I once fancied the idea of being an elevator mechanic. Not sure why. Figured you'd get plenty of variety. Never be at the same workplace two days in a row. That appealed to me.

Screwed up my courage and found my way to the guidance office. The door was locked. In the window, a handwritten sign; "the guidance counsellor is out to lunch." It was two in the afternoon.

The guidance counsellors are still out to lunch, all over north America. Coincidentally, the same paper has a feature article on the shortage of skilled labor not only in Newfoundland, but all over the country. They could have added Louisiana too.

In hindsight, I can't blame the guidance counsellor for the fact that my dreams of becoming an elevator mechanic were never realized (although I came close; built a couple of escalators when I worked at Sandvik).

Guidance counsellors are just teachers who took a couple of extra courses to get themselves out of the classroom. These aren't courses about what skills are needed for which careers or what kind of careers are likely to be in demand. They're courses about identifying students' "learning styles" and how to make sure their self-esteem banks are perpetually topped up. The only career most guidance counsellors know anything about is teaching.

Twenty-five years ago I was on a Lackie Brothers crew installing an overhead crane in a steel mill. (Why do they call them overhead? Aren't all cranes overhead?) Harnischfeger had sent a guy all the way from Wisconsin to supervise the operation. He was in his late sixties, smoked one cigarette after another, and had just returned to work after convalescing from a triple by-pass.

He was a  hands-on supervisor, that's for sure, up there on the girders with the rest of us, and getting his hands just as dirty. Between the heart issues and the cigarettes we had side-bets going about when he was going to drop dead, but I think what would have killed the man is if you'd told him he couldn't go to work anymore. He absolutely loved his job.

That's the kind of guy guidance counsellors should spend a day job shadowing. It would be far more useful than another course in teen psychology.