Can't really corveé labour skilled jobs which require passing a lot of exams. Even in the military.

What you can do, at state scale, is pass everybody through a services training filter and sit them under the sorting hat after three months to winnow out skills and potentials of interest.

Some are clear rejects, some are good for getting up early and walking perimeters, others would suit the motor pool. An occasional few will gel for traffic control, signal intell, etc.

The trick then, for a state, is to incentivize with carrots, sticks, patriotic abstractions like duty, etc. the ones they want for the jobs they have.

Now its time for levelling up training.

The characters in the movie and TV series MAS*H included unwilling civilian draftees who were doctors drafted to serve in the Korean War.

Doctors need to pass a lot of exams.

You can draft a doctor, from pool of doctors. You can't draft ATC, because there is no pool of spare ATCs. It would be like drafting air defense operators - there is no pool of them outside military.

If the recent news about moving lots of soldiers from EU Nato installations back home is true, they'll have a ton of trained active military ATC's available to use in the US soon.

I'm pretty sure some of the air traffic controllers for military airfields in WWII were draftees, just like many air defense operators were draftees before the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973.

We know from the PATCO strike there is a pool of spare ATCs, including "military controllers, and retired personnel who temporarily returned to service". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

Thus, retired civilian personnel is a possible draft pool for a skilled job like ATC which require passing a lot of exams.

That pool is small, certainly, but it was enough to break PATCO.

I think you've forgotten that the original post was about hiring gamers to do this job.

Which they can't do unless they are heavily trained.