A few thoughts. My wife, back when she worked in sales at a major dept. store was making $8-10/hr with commission circa 1985. She also had very good health insurance at a pretty cheap price with them. In today’s dollars that would be roughly $17-22/hr. She got that job after 1 or 2 minor jobs, with probably no more than 6 months prior sales experience. I also had a summer job around 1985, at an electronics assembly facility that specialized in small lot jobs. I was paid something like $8-9/hr, and had no prior experience.
Back in the 1990’s I got a half dozen pricey and specialized 1 week training courses, including traveling to the companies site. The next company that hired me, paid my costs to travel across 2 states and a house sale, to pull me in. Until the Dot-com bust, I got further expensive training. I was at a big enough company that the trainer was brought to us. One doesn’t see that very much anymore even in the professional technology fields.
One hears about unemployment/under-employment quite a bit, as median wages are still below where they were in 2007, and is also below the level from the late 1990’s. Sure the unemployment rate has slipped under 6% nationally. However, the U-6 (Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force) is still at 11.5%. And the unemployment rate for millennials is substantially higher than the 6%. And yet, the Case-Shiller housing index has been climbing back up to levels from the previous decade.
So in places where unemployment is actually low, employers are going to have to rediscover what they seemed to have forgotten after a few decades. Hire (maybe at a lower rate), but train employees up. If you really want/need the skills now, then offer more money and/or scout around beyond the city your located; and one might need to “advertise” more…scary thought indeed.