This so-called "crisis of competence" has nothing to do with the right-wing shibboleths of "participation trophies" (variants of which have been complained about for CENTURIES!) and everything to do with the destructive effects of short-term planning and practices of leadership under "next quarter is king" capitalism.

The problem is that there are perverse incentives baked into capitalist praxis that make companies have to do short-term thinking instead of long-term. An example of this kind of short term thinking reward is that it looks good for the investor-class rubes when a company lets go half its workforce because on the balance sheet (something easily measured) you can immediately see a cut in costs without a corresponding loss of revenue. Profits seem to go up and thus the investor rubes are happy. Unfortunately there's something very valuable lost in that cut of costs that's not so easily measured as to persuade the idiot class who wind up in accounting-grade investment: institutional knowledge. So for an immediate gain of modest amount, the rubes cost the company the ability to actually continue to innovate, service, maintain, etc. their product or service line and over time the value of the company drops irrevocably. This induces the rubes to apply pressure to cut costs again (because it worked so well last time) and thus the death spiral begins and the company dies, to be carved into bleeding chunks that are sold off. Which again the investor-class rubes think is hunky-dory because they get the money from that sale. Who cares if the company is now dead and valueless?

So what does this have to do with a "crisis of competence"?

There are several issues:

1

There once was a time when new grads from university (who don't know shit about real-life praxis in any field!) would be trained on-the-job to become valuable, competent employees. They'd be given, in effect, an apprenticeship in their position, at quite a bit of cost to the company in the short term, to become valued and valuable employees later.

That "quite a bit of cost" is investor-rube kryptonite. So companies stopped training new employees and started poaching already-trained employees from other places. This worked great in the short term because the company would save the training costs and get an employee who could hit the ground running and be productive in a short time. This worked great until ... ah ... well I'm sure you can see how this is not sustainable when every company starts doing this.

As a "solution" for this, companies started applying pressure on universities to stop teaching airy-fairy "theory" and "fundamentals" and "genuine comprehension" and start teaching "job skills". Which means new grads could come in and fill a job quickly, but had no theoretical underpinning to understand the job they were doing.

And what a surprise! When you undermine education and turn it into job training, you lose competence! "OMG! THERE'S A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE! AND IT CAN'T BE OUR FAULT SO IT MUST BE PARTICIPATION TROPHIES! YEAH, THAT'S THE TICKET! PARTICIPATION TROPHIES ARE THE PROBLEM AND NOT OUR OWN MYOPIA!!!!111oneoneoneeleventy11!!!"

2

After #1 has been so thoroughly universalized, once again companies started looking for ways to cut costs in the short term without any regard for the longer term. How else can you save costs in the short term? Oh, right! You can squeeze the workers to do more work with fewer resources! Nothing could possibly go wrong here, right?!

Workers are thus forced to work to ever-more-ludicrous deadlines while having fewer resources to get their jobs done. It is inevitable that this process leads to lower quality as shortcuts are taken, problems are papered over, and quality drops. In the short term you don't notice this and profits rise. But as your product gets worse and worse, people look for alternatives, sales drop, revenues drop, and ... the investor class triggers #1. Or more of #2. Or #3 (for which q.v.).

But as before "IT CAN'T BE OUR FAULT SO IT MUST BE THE WORKERS! THEY'RE JUST LOWER QUALITY TODAY BECAUSE OF PARTICIPATION TROPHIES!" (Insert any of the other right-wing idiot shibboleths in place of participation trophies here: DEI, feminism, BLM, immigrants taking ur jerbs, etc. etc. etc. It's all the same bullshit made up by the actual guilty parties directing blame any other way they can.)

3

Then we move on to the third one: perpetual crunch. Most of the corporate world runs in permanent crunch mode. Everything's an "...EMERGENCY GOING ON. IT'S STILL GOING ON. IT'S STILL AN EMERGENCY." People are squeezed to work harder and longer (and often for lower salaries). This is, as mentioned above in other scenarios, unsustainable. Human beings need time to recover from stress. Adding stress has one of two outcomes.

The first of these is that people just stop giving a shit. If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. People start just doing their jobs and nothing more (which the corporate lapdog press starts calling disingenuously "quiet quitting"). This of course doesn't suit the suits trying to squeeze every last drop of blood out of the corpses of their workforce, so they squeeze harder.

Now we get the second outcome: burnout. Experienced people quit. Not just the company they're working for (though because of #1 that might happen a few times first), but rather entire industries. And when the experienced (read: competent) people quit, you suddenly have a "CRISIS OF COMPETENCE" invariably blamed on the usual right-wing shibboleths of laziness, DEI, feminism, and, naturally, that perennial favourite of the short of thinking, "PARTICIPATION TROPHIES!!!!1111oneoneoneeleventyone!!".

So you want to solve the utterly fictitious crisis of competence? Get rid of the real incompetence: the myopic monied classes. (Personally I'm a fan of guillotines for this, but firing squads are OK too.)