Don’t force child care workers to get college degrees

the irony is that in locales that require licenses, more unlicensed non-code compliant work is often done because there is no diy path. in many locales, building inspectors are readily available and happy to inspect homeowner work.

Credentials are rarely required by law; rather "relevant experience and/or qualifications" is the usual bar. Of course some professions are heavily regulated, I'm not talking about those.

But then, insurance is often required, or de facto required, and to get that, you need a qualification.

IME this leads to a lot of professions staffed with poorly-trained people, often not much bothered by the job, with one piece of paper showing a low-quality qualification, and another showing professional indemnity.

It also pushes actual regulation onto private entities with their own agendas, which possibly bothers me even more.

Even marginal/trainable skills draw a premium. We have a good friend who owns a seafood restaurant - she’s paying $30/hr to shuck oysters.

Likewise for a dental hygienist, who is doing things like operating X-Ray equipment and other invasive gadgets. I don't think the solution is to de-regulate this kind of thing.

And there always will be, regardless of how many years of college the staff has.

> Do NOT assume that nurses, hygienists, etc. understand things even as basic as germ theory and its implications. Do NOT assume that laypeople understand just how bad industrial chemicals can be. etc.

If nurses don't understand these things and they have had many years of training, that seems to argue that additional training does not improve outcomes. And for the record, I'm not saying I want Joe Blow to be hired yesterday and start cleaning teeth today. A trade training program is of course necessary to acquire the skills and learn the procedures to perform <skilled job>. But I don't think it's necessary to have college-level germ theory background to understand how to sterilize equipment and why it's important.

> A 2 year degree barely teaches enough for people to be functional in jobs that can affect someone else's health.

I won't disagree there, because I think college is pretty useless these days other than to give you the piece of paper that lets companies easily filter potential employees, with non-college applicants going in the trash.

> The solution to a lack of people for <job> is to PAY MORE MONEY. Why does this seem to be so hard for people to understand?

I agree with you that companies have taken advantage of employees for a very long time and am glad that workers are pushing back on low wages and unreasonable employment situations. But if we keep requiring more credentialing at high expense that people simply cannot afford without crippling loans, you can't fix that with higher wages. The result would be that teeth cleaning would become unaffordable to the average person. Oh wait, I know the solution to that: more insurance! (See: medical care)

Well, I'll wear that. I still think early education should be paid better and be trained to recognise development issues and help triage them, and to impart good habits. Can they instill or improve them? Fair to question. At least they can make sure they happen, experientially per child.

I don't think teachers at kindy can make Michaelangelo happen but yes I do think they encourage rich experiences and those help kids build better, stronger pathways in life. If you don't get to play with water and scissors and pencils at home, kindy is where it happens. And learning how to control your temper, and deal with other people.

The persistent biter who'd been brought up by grandparents on the end of a piece of string and the firebug with adhd? Nobody was going to get rid of all of that. But some kids arrive at school unable to even hold a pencil or recognise their name or distinguish numbers from letters and they may wind up inside the normal range but they're getting a harder start.

Meanwhile, an important piece of career advice for marketers, bankers, and other people who think of themselves as commanding high leverage is this: Don't mistake the value of the seat you're in as being your value. The number of clients who can put a marketer in a seat where 5% of a skills-difference is an amount of money on the same order of magnitude as the marketer's take-home pay is extremely small relative to the number of marketers who want that job. Meanwhile there are tons of people hiring doctors, plumbers, and farriers who care a great deal about a 5% skills-difference, and many of them have money to pay for it. That gives doctors, plumbers, and farriers vastly superior bargaining power when compared to marketers, which, in turn, means that they get to extract a higher share of what they're worth to the client as take-home pay.

This is such an USA point of view… University is free here.