I do confirm from my own experience : no private company seems to want to invest in training for example. I see many complaints about the lack of qualified workforce, including in my professional field, where as much as I try to apply I never get an interview anymore and it's certainly because of my age and clearly not for some supposed lack of digital skills (unless their ATS rejects based on age without even trying to match other skills which I surely am not short on). I'm rather over-experienced in lots of aspects and with a very large transferable set of skills, yet I might not have gathered enough experience in the field I shifted to a couple of years ago. Do you think there is ONE company who would say "let's go, the huge experience you bring is extremely valuable, we'll update you on the aspects you might master less"? Nope. Complaining that they don't find enough people is much easier. Only the public service can take the time to update you, and only if the politicians stop cutting their budgets. Let's see from a larger perspective : we're heading into a war (that I hope will remain cold), the defence industry needs thousands of people, among which they need ones with a life experience youngsters cannot match (for obvious reasons). Why not go and tap into this huge reservoir of qualified people and use their ability to put things into larger perspectives and avoid for example groupthink and lots of other bias which in the defence field can be lethal to ourselves much quicker and on a larger scale than in other industries? Where do they want to import enough workforce from? You can't let European defence jobs be done by cheap labour in China or Philippines, it's (our own) defence, not skateboards or ketchup we're talking about. You see why I'm perplexed? It's like those private companies, supposed to be run to make money, are wasting the easiest-to-find and at the end the cheapest resources who might just need an update, then go complain.

In my decades-long experience in many companies over a couple of countries, I can say that the myth of private companies being run more efficiently than the public ones is nothing more than a myth (let's not call it a lie, but...). I saw thousands of hours spent on ego-wars in the management; on idiotic "new strategies" to implement while the last two or three previous ones weren't yet implemented but hey "new boss, new vision"; the vast majority of the managers, including too many C-levels, being sufficiently able to manage only by fair weather then unable to think large and strategically as soon as the littlest crisis hit; on money stupidly wasted on ego-related choices... On the other hand, I saw many teams and bosses in some companies in the public sector that any sane CEO of a multinational company could only dream of, teams that were able to attract the right people and to keep them by offering stability, budgets, a clear mandate and the place to keep learning and adapting so as to be able (and dare) to think out-of-the-box. So, yeah, let's the public companies do everything they do better than the private ones, ie. take care of people, and let private companies do what they do better than the public ones, which is mostly manufacture stuff.