The requirements: Must be certified in Blackjack, Baccarat, and Pai Gow Poker. Must have a working knowledge of Deck Mate 2 and Safe-Shoe 2 shuffle machines. Must possess a minimum of 2 years in a “direct customer-facing hospitality role.” All of this for the generous starting wage of $12 an hour plus tips, in a city where the average one-bedroom apartment rents for $1,472 a month. This isn’t an entry-level job. It’s a filter designed to catch fully-formed professionals and pay them like novices.
Welcome
LIE
“It’s a closed door with a welcome mat in front of it.”
The Investment Gap, Not a Skills Gap
We talk about a skills gap as if it’s some mysterious plague that descended upon the workforce, leaving them unqualified for the glorious jobs available. It’s a convenient narrative. It places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the individual. You didn’t study the right major. You didn’t get the right certification. You didn’t teach yourself the right proprietary software on your own time, with your own money. The truth is much simpler and far more damning.
There is no skills gap.There is an investment gap.
Companies offloaded the cost of creating a skilled worker from the corporate balance sheet onto the individual’s personal debt.
Cost
The expectation now is for a candidate to arrive perfectly formed, like a product fresh from a factory, ready to be plugged into the machine with zero ramp-up time. The casino doesn’t want to pay to teach someone Baccarat. They expect the person to show up having already paid for and passed a course from a specialized casino dealer school that does the job the casino’s HR department used to do. The cost of entry into the profession is no longer your time and loyalty, but a cash payment of several thousand dollars before you’ve even earned your first paycheck.
My Own Delusion
I’m going to criticize this whole system, but I have to admit, I’ve been part of the problem. Years ago, I was tasked with hiring a junior designer. I wrote a description that I thought was reasonable at the time. I see it now for what it was: an exercise in delusion. I asked for 2 years of experience with a specific piece of design software. The problem? That software had only been publicly available for 12 months. My request was not just unreasonable; it was impossible. Out of 232 applications, not a single person met the criteria because the criteria was a fantasy. We ended up hiring someone with zero experience in that specific tool but a demonstrated ability to learn, and we-get this-trained them. It was a revelation born from my own incompetence.
“My request was not just unreasonable; it was impossible.”
– Author reflecting on hiring criteria
Hyper-Specialization and Lost Crafts
It’s a strange thing, our obsession with hyper-specialization. I wonder if the old guilds look down, or wherever old guilds look from, and just laugh. A cooper didn’t expect a teenager to show up knowing the precise tensile strength of white oak and how to heat and bend it. They took on an apprentice. They taught. They passed down the craft. That was the transaction. It was an investment in the future of the trade, and the future of the company. Now, that investment is seen as an unacceptable quarterly loss.
This leads to roles that sound like they were generated by a mad-libs bot. A friend of mine, Camille P., recently landed a job as a “Thread Tension Calibrator.” It sounds made up. It’s not. She works for a company that manufactures high-performance carbon fiber sails for racing yachts. Her sole job is to ensure the tension of the threads being woven by 12 different models of automated looms is precise to within a minuscule tolerance. A deviation of just 2% can cause a catastrophic sail failure during a race. There is no university degree for this. There is no general-purpose education that prepares you for it.
Camille’s Arcane Skill
So how did she get the job? The company didn’t train her. They posted a job requiring 2 years of experience with their specific German-made looms and a working knowledge of their 2 proprietary tension sensors. It’s the same pattern. They wanted a finished product. Camille had spent the previous two years as an apprentice-a real, old-fashioned apprentice-to the one person in the state who knew how to do this job, a man who was about to retire. She worked for him for next to nothing, learning a skill so niche it borders on the arcane. She was only able to do this because she had family who could support her. She paid her dues in time and lost wages, an upfront investment of tens of thousands of dollars, to be qualified for what is technically her first “real” job in the industry. She is the perfect employee, custom-built for the role.
“The company gets all the benefit and shouldered none of the cost of her creation.”
“It’s a tax on ambition, payable only by those who can afford it. This isn’t a meritocracy. It’s a pay-to-play beta test for a career.”
We’ve created a system where entry into skilled trades and professions is increasingly reserved for those with the pre-existing capital to fund their own training.
(Estimated per individual)
The company saves $52,000 in training costs, and a talented individual from a poorer background is locked out, not by lack of talent, but by lack of funds.
Refreshing a Broken System
The whole experience of navigating this feels like trying to fix a software bug by clearing your browser cache. You know it’s probably not the real solution, that the underlying code is the problem, but it’s the only action you have available, a small ritual of control in a system that feels utterly broken. You refresh the page, hoping the impossible requirements will magically resolve themselves into something achievable. They never do.