There is no shortage of people trying to get the jobs and getting hired, we have over a 100 trainies in our facility. The problem is the training program is being mismanaged. There were years we had almost no trainies.. The current desire of management to get everyone through and the percived shortage has hurt training. It used to take around 4 years to become FPL. Now it is taking only 2 years for some. On the surface you say hey, that is great. The problem is the trainies are not spending enough time seasoning on sectors as associate controllers. When Trainies used to spend a year or so seasoning they were exposed to different situations and observed differnet controllers control techniques. This allowed them to gain some experiance. Now while being rushed through the program they train on one sector, get certified, season for a week or so and then repeat the cycle. What we get are clones of the training team with very little experiance. And when the training team are unexperianced controllers each generation is worse than the last. Hence the increase in incident rates. So what does the FAA do to make this work, they split sectors to make them easier, they require two controllers were one used to be fine. The FAA's failure to keep a steady stream of trainies over the years is the main reason behind this current situation. Sure they would have had a few years with more controllers than they wanted/needed but which situation is worse. There are enough controllers the FAA just fails to train them properly and put them in the right place making some facilities understaffed. NATCA, which i am a member, is a typical union, they say what ever suits their cause and twists the facts to suit their needs. They lost a major battle over the last contract and are doing whatever they can to try to make up for it. Bottom line is the FAA misjudged how many experinced controllers would retire in 2006, 2007 and probably 2008. They did not ramp up the hiring and training soon enough.