Industrial/Education Levels

[kenny445]

Hi Guys,


Not sure if this is of use to anyone but I was messing about in my city and when I clicked on the Industrial building it shows a little ring.

The outer ring displays the ratio of available workplaces by education level.
The inner circle displays the ratio of workers by education levels.

I believe this could be the reason why, like myself kept coming up against "Not enough workers" issue.

Due to having to many high educated workers in one area and not enough in others.

 

[LukeSurl]

Not quite, but close. The location of jobs is not an issue for cims as they're just prepared to take a job the other side of the city to where they live just as much as a job next door. In fact, there's no mechanic in the game to encourage them to take the nearby job rather than the far away one.

Cims can take jobs below their education level, but not above. If you have cims that are looking for jobs but are too dumb for those that are available industry/commerce/offices won't be able to fill these spots and will complain that "worker education is too low"

You get the more general "Not enough workers" issue if you have too few workers (adults and young adults not at university) for your jobs. [side point: for some reason about 4% of work-age cims will always be unemployed. Slackers] Education doesn't affect this on bulk, but it can impact which buildings aren't able to fill their jobs.

Cims working at a job they are overeducated for will immediately leave if jobs at their skill level become available. So say you have an area of farmland which employs a bunch of college-educated people in level 1 "uneducated" jobs because its the best job these people could get. Then you zone a large office zone. In a flash all of these college grads will throw down their pitchforks and get cushy office jobs. Your farmland has suddenly lost half its workers, will complain and eventually become abandoned.

Some majors like to deliberately under-supply education in order to maintain a workforce for the menial jobs. Otherwise, zoning slightly more residential, and keeping unemployment at about 10% means that there's always workers available.

 

[Maxxpain]

Luke hit the most vital point right at the end of the discussion. If you keep your unemployment at 10% your industry, whether it be farming, forestry, oil, ore or generic will always operate at close to full industry regardless of how over educated your cims are.
I have a 400k city with 67% highly educated and 10% unemployment and I have large extensive forestry and farming areas that are rarely looking for workers apart from the initial establishment of the business.
By keeping the education level up and maintaining the unemployment you can have a city of high land value and still have thriving farming and forestry sectors.

 

[DocDesastro]

But wouldn't it be better if the simulation would offer different jobs in the same lot? Imagine a fast-food restaurant. You would probably offer 10 jobs for uneducated people for people at the couter and building burgers, 3 medium for the shift leaders and 1 highly educated for the manager. Just as an example.

 

[TH1]

But wouldn't it be better if the simulation would offer different jobs in the same lot? Imagine a fast-food restaurant. You would probably offer 10 jobs for uneducated people for people at the couter and building burgers, 3 medium for the shift leaders and 1 highly educated for the manager. Just as an example.

It is quite like that. Many workplaces in the game need people on different education levels.

 

[Maxxpain]

But wouldn't it be better if the simulation would offer different jobs in the same lot? Imagine a fast-food restaurant. You would probably offer 10 jobs for uneducated people for people at the couter and building burgers, 3 medium for the shift leaders and 1 highly educated for the manager. Just as an example.

I'm just offering a viable solution with the current game mechanics for people that want to have thriving versions of all industry.
I'm not getting into a debate about how things should or shouldn't be.

 

[joewagner501]

I've also noticed keeping a 10% unemployment level keeps the factories/farms/forestry full of employees. Drop below that, and the workers aren't available. I keep an eye on the unemployment level and when it gets close to 10% I zone more residential. Once the unemployment hits around 14% I will zone some type of industrial/commercial/office.

 

[Lord Canterbury]

Perhaps the simulation needs a Dunce Rate, to reflect that fact that even in have have an over-supply of university places, not everyone is cut out to get a degree. You'll still have people who drop out of school and move into forestry. If a plenitude of schools still left some uneducated people it would be a good driver to keep some low level jobs around instead of just building shiny lawyers offices.

 

[joewagner501]

I like that idea.

 

[LukeSurl]

Perhaps the simulation needs a Dunce Rate, to reflect that fact that even in have have an over-supply of university places, not everyone is cut out to get a degree. You'll still have people who drop out of school and move into forestry. If a plenitude of schools still left some uneducated people it would be a good driver to keep some low level jobs around instead of just building shiny lawyers offices.

If I were overhauling the education/jobs system of the game I'd do this and another couple of things.

I'd have it that "educated" was the normal level, most immigrants would have this level of education and almost all jobs would require "educated" cims at a minimum. Jobs for uneducated cims would be few and far between. Being "uneducated" would place cims in an underclass that has severe unemployment (and thus crime) problems.

This would punish, severely, not providing enough elementary schools for your cims, something which in the current game is not a major problem and sometimes a legitimate tactic. If kids can't get even an elementary education they're going to be a social problem for the rest of their lives.

Add to this a "failure rate" at each stage of education like Lord Canterbury suggests and you've got a distribution of cims across the skills rage. Plus, even with tons of education buildings, you'd always have a supply of uneducated cims being a problem you have to deal with, which would add an extra challenge to the game [especially in regards to crime which is very easy to deal with in most cities]

I think all of the above could be done with mods. I have one other suggestion which would probably require a change to the base game.

The failure rate could be reduced by extra funding, policies (i.e. a "smaller class sizes" policy might reduce the failure rate in schools but reduce the capacity per building) and some specialized buildings. The latter could be quite interesting - libraries, museums etc. wouldn't increase capacity of education services but would make them more effective by reducing the dropout rate.