I don't want to hire a DBA that's never touched a DB before at this point, though - since that field has been around for a while now, there's now a lot of signaling where before noone could distinguish themselves. Those who have the aptitude and/or are motivated/interested in the field have made themselves into DBAs or something similar that could easily transition on their own time. I don't want to hire a warm body that's looking to work just for a paycheck. If you've never bothered to learn to program, I don't want to hire you as a programmer, even if I think I could train you.
There is a shortage of employable people in the US, and a glut of unemployable. To me, this means that our culture and our education system need a lot of help.
My point is that when DBAs were new(ish), you had a lot of people you had to train to become them. We don't see this as a problem now because we're past that point in the database arena. The people I knew who ran databases when I was in high school had all learned it on a job somewhere. It's only with my generation (it seems) that DBA was something you got a lot of external training for.
Some of the jobs quoted in the article are short workers because they're relatively new. "Managing integrated supply chains" is something most workers would have learned only recently, since before the spread of IT in the late 1990s/2000s it was pretty much the province of major corporations.
There is a shortage of employable people in the US, and a glut of unemployable. To me, this means that our culture and our education system need a lot of help.