And even the below average employees still need jobs, and aren't going to become 'stars', no matter how many times they retrain.

Paradigm Theory of the Early Nineteen Seventies. Workers would have to be flexible as well as mobile. Do remember Corporate running so called Managers Training Courses to be able to pick and chose our new hires. My question to the Corporate so called Trainer was,so now we are to hire the new hot shot coming through the door providing he lives in a Mobile Home. So much for that Management Job. Best vertical move I ever made. There is just so much Stupid one can endure.

And while you're REtraining, people are also expected to absorb all the housing-and-food costs themselves. However, Federal student loan support is only there for you the first time around when you go to college.

This is the trap that long-term unemployed people face later. There are sources who might assist you with re-training. The government has been throwing money at employment. People practically scold you for not taking advantage of it. However, a training program requires a certain time commitment in which you must have food and housing. Just as much as the government wants to throw employment help at you to prove it's helping you seek work, they have been avidly withholding assistance from housing to make sure you don't become "dependent" on government. You have to have a job in order to have housing. But if you have a job you can't have the training. In fact, many training programs, like those associated with the Workforce Incentive Act, say they will not give you job search support and training assistance at the same time because they know you can't make a commitment to both. So because the government can't let you have housing, then you can't commit to a training program. The only people who can commit to re-training later in life are people who had savings or a family to support them, or had the credit (and willingness) to take out the loans.

And economists expect people to do this in a serial basis? To foot the bill, time, and energy for repeated re-training to accommodate ourselves to an employer that perfectly fits into some perfectly theorized market system? This is ridiculous?

And at the end of it all, what ends up happening is society radically splits between the people who can't even make a living by working in the normal way (and everyone knows it), and the people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars by getting in on some investment or some inside government knowledge. This is the difference between the people who being forced to fit in and the people who are sitting comfortably outside the system and just have to make a few phone calls to get things done.

With that experience come thoughts which may fall out of the management's direction. I see most companies are looking for "yes men" style employees. Easier to create that with the blank slate of fresh college grad.

The Reagan Revolution destroyed the "social contract" between employer and employee. Unless we go back to that kind of system the future is bleak for workers. The multiple jobs model is a "dead end" economically for 80% of the work force. You will end up in misery and poverty over the long term. Retirement will be just about impossible. And if you get ill or something else happen you are finished because the system the GOP wants to create offer NO help at all.

at their own expense. It artificially creates the impression that there are fewer people seeking jobs (lowering unemployment rate) while doing next to nothing for the workers except wasting productive years of their lives.

There are jobs worth getting trained for, but IMHO those jobs are not what the 'adult education' industry is training people for.

We worship "productivity," which is a grave mistake. "Economic productivity" as it is now defined is a direct measure of the damage we do to this planet and the human spirit. We are killing our planet and ourselves.

I think education ought to be free for life so everyone can maximize their own potential. Zero illiteracy, zero innumeracy, zero artlessness, zero scientific illiteracy.

Certain tracks of education ought to come with pay beyond "starving student" support. If education is free for life, then we will need more teachers and college professors.

Pay students to go to school and become teachers and professors. Pay students who are learning how to care for of others and the planet; primary care physicians, nurses, environmental remediation biologists and engineers. Pay all the people who will learn how to create sustainable, comfortable, low birth rate, low energy communities. Pay people who will figure out how to cope with accelerating climate change.

Modern civilization is building a highway to hell. We need to stop.