BLACKSBURG, Va.—It’s been a choppy ride for many of the folks relying on paychecks from Boeing Co. Slammed by the pandemic and the grounding of its most important plane, the aerospace giant said recently that it expects to end 2021 with 30,000 fewer workers than it started this year.
“Decisions like these are not easy,” Boeing Chief Executive David Calhoun said on a webcast. These job cuts come as the airline industry weathers an unprecedented travel drought and Boeing endures a “year that is among the most difficult in our 100-year history.”
Even as Mr. Calhoun shows current employees the exit, he is pushing forward a program at Virginia Tech, his alma mater, designed to better prepare the next-generation’s workforce to avoid a similar fate.
An accountant by training, the 63-year-old executive recently told me Corporate America mislabels what he calls a “discovery gap” as the “skills gap.” Colleges, he said, do a yeoman’s job churning out competent coders, scientists and engineers. Such skills are in long supply. Where they fall short is teaching how to think outside the cubicle or beyond the screen in front of them.
“We’re now trying to solve for things outside just the raw technology, and we have very few people who are really skilled at doing that kind of thing,” Mr. Calhoun said. Creating autonomous planes that don’t need a physical pilot in the cockpit (think pilotless cargo aircraft or urban air taxis) or repairing flawed product programs require as much understanding of how humans are designed as machines are.
