Proponents of the idea tell an intuitively appealing story: information technology has hit American firms like a whirlwind, intensifying demand for technical skills and leaving unprepared American workers in the dust. The mismatch between high employer requirements and low employee skills leads to bad outcomes such as high unemployment and slow economic growth.

This view of the nation’s economic challenges distracts us from more productive ways of thinking about skills and economic growth while promoting unproductive hand-wringing.

The problem is, when we look closely at the data, this story doesn’t match the facts. What’s more, this view of the nation’s economic challenges distracts us from more productive ways of thinking about skills and economic growth while promoting unproductive hand-wringing and a blinkered focus on only the supply side of the labor market—that is, the workers.

Although much research touches on this topic, almost none of the existing studies directly measure skills, the key quantity of interest. I have conducted a series of nationally representative skill surveys covering a range of technical occupations: manufacturing production workers, IT help-desk technicians, and laboratory technologists. The surveys specifically target managers with knowledge of both hiring and operations at their businesses. The basic strategy is to ask: what skills do employers demand, and do the employers that demand high skill levels have trouble hiring workers?

The results yield a number of surprises. First, persistent hiring problems are less widespread than many pundits and industry representatives claim. A few years back, Paul Osterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and I found that less than a quarter of manufacturing plants had one or more production-­worker vacancies that had lasted for three months or more. By contrast, industry claims at the time were that three-­quarters or more faced a persistent inability to hire skilled workers.

More recently, I have looked for signs of hiring trouble in IT and clinical laboratory occupations. Given a tighter labor market and higher educational requirements for these entry-level technical jobs, it would be reasonable to expect hiring to be more difficult. Not so. Only 15 percent of IT help desks report extended vacancies in technician positions. While the results do show higher levels of long-term lab-tech openings, it turns out that many of these are concentrated in the overnight shift and thus reflect inadequate compensation for difficult working conditions, not a structural skill deficiency. A little over a quarter of clinical diagnostic labs report at least one long-term vacancy.

The survey results do show some hiring challenges, but not for the reasons posited by the conventional skill-gap narrative. In fact, the data reveal that high-tech and cutting-edge establishments do not have greater hiring difficulties than other establishments. Furthermore, the data imply that we should be careful about calling for more technical skills without specifying which skills we are talking about. It is quite common to hear advocates—and even academics—assert that the answer to the nation’s labor-market and economic-growth challenges is for workers to acquire more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills. However, my data show that employers looking for higher-level computer skills generally do not have a harder time filling job openings. Manufacturers requiring higher-level math do sometimes have more hiring challenges, but math requirements are not a problem for IT help desks or clinical labs.

So what are the skill requirements most consistently associated with hiring difficulties? In manufacturing, it’s higher-level reading, while for help-desk technicians it’s higher-level writing. Proponents of the skill-gap theory sometimes assert that the problem, if not a lack of STEM skills, is actually the result of a poor attitude or inadequate soft skills among younger workers. But while demand for a few soft skills—like the ability to initiate new tasks without guidance from management—is occasionally predictive of hiring problems, most soft-skill demands, including requirements for cooperation and teamwork, are not.