Skill Building

The WorldSkills Competition is a sort of blue-collar olympiad. It’s great if you can run a mile in less than four minutes, but can you break down a carburetor?

Skittish employers have memories like elephants: They know from past experience that in the wake of economic disaster, they’d better not take on too many employees too soon as the economy recovers. Therefore, unemployment rates will lag behind in the recovery.

But soon the West may face a massive shortage of available skilled laborers. And that’s what makes the WorldSkills Competition so interesting. It’s a competition, incidentally, in which the United States mustered only two silver medals last year.

What is WorldSkills you ask? It’s basically the Blue-Collar Olympics.

In Calgary 2009, the United States medaled only in Welding and Auto Repair. So disappointing. We seemed like a lock in Sheet Metal Fabrication, but Chinese Taipei really brought it.

WorldSkills 2011 is in London, and our Pastry Cook team is vowing to bake up a gold.

This is no joke. The biannual trade-athalon is actually a serious international showcase of skills on which our societies and civilizations depend.

Here’s...