Friday, May 20, 2011

Job Skills, Jobs Lost

This is slightly off-topic in terms of being animation specific, but completely on-topic in terms of speaking about how jobs not attached to a graduate degree are now thought of in the U.S. of A.

When I broke into animation, the "skilled industry veterans" were people highly qualified at the craft. But funny thing. They were men (and sometimes women) who had been working in the business since high school ... or their initial two years of art school. There were not many people running around with Masters or PhDs. They just knew how to draw ... how to paint ... how to design and animate and create their movie art like wizards.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very poignant, but the GOP likes things this way. Here comes more cheap, immigrant labor...that the GOP can persecute later.

Anonymous said...

This is sadly so true. Here in Los Angeles, it is hard to find skilled tradespeople under 40 who weren't born south of the border. When I was looking for skilled contractors for some work on my home, they were either from Central America or former Eastern Block countries.

I guess I'm turning into an old fogey, but when I was a kid, people talked constantly about having a viable trade and skill set. And there was an acknowledgement that you had to work your way up to get that. We can complain that our schools don't support or teach trades any more, but it's not the school's fault. It's the fault of a society that stopped valuing and emphasizing the idea that having a working trade is the backbone of much of the middle class.

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