Whose fault is this?

That was a rhetorical question.

A bunch of oldsters in the defense/aerospace industry are fixing to retire. There's concern that there won't be enough young people to take their place. The article goes on to say that there is a talent pool, but said talent is more interested in working in other industries.

Well, DUH.

So they're trying to get to kids in early grades, to get them interested in careers. They're also trying to make themselves more attractive to recent graduates by offering good benefits. (Evidently, they're doing very little to entice more experienced workers.)

For 14 years, I lived in an area that was chock-full of aerospace/defense companies, and I couldn't even get an interview. I had no trouble staying employed while I was in Florida (except for that last year), but I couldn't get near a government contractor.

In retrospect, this is okay with me, and I realize that writers are not really the group of workers that this "crisis" is about anyway. But I worked with a lot of very bright technical people who had similarly been unable to get a foot in the door. Or, they'd worked at one of those places for a short while, only to be dismissed during a mass layoff. Or, they could only get in as contractors, when they really wanted job stability and insurance, because they were trying to raise a family.

So, I'm very sorry if these industries are worried, but their strategy is overlooking one very important thing: If there's a shortage of people who want to work for them now, it's because the current generations of job-hunters either remember the layoffs/bloodbaths firsthand or have heard about them from their parents. It wasn't just the young, marketable workers who lost their jobs - it was also older people who had worked in the same industry their entire lives and didn't have the right kind of experience to find adequate employment in another industry.

I realize that the layoffs couldn't be helped, but it's the way they were conducted that alienated so many people: a constant cycle of hiring and laying off, with no one feeling secure about their position or their ability to find a comparable new job.

And the industries are doing nothing to convince anyone that it won't happen again. Of course, they can't promise that, but they're essentially ignoring the thing that gave them the bad rep in the first place. My morbid suggestion is to include a merit-based severance package among the advertised benefits, and a post-layoff education program to better qualify ex-employees for work in another industry.

I realize that would never happen. I'm just saying that's what it would take for a lot of people to ever come near aerospace or defense again, after so many people got screwed so badly before.