It has been reported that 32% of U.S. manufacturers are reporting skill shortages during the current Recession. Projections are that this number could increase to 62% soon.
Corporations are also reporting that there is a lack of leadership talent from which to choose. Among the workforce areas claiming that jobs are available are in the skilled trades, sales representatives, technicians, engineers, accounting & finance, administrative & production assistants, and laborers. And this list is not complete.
Despite an unemployment rate stuck at 10% one of the great ironies of the Great Recession is that there is a shortage of high quality and desirable job applicants. There certainly is no shortage of sad, demoralized, and desperate Americans begging to be hired. But when it comes to potential hires who meet the valued qualifications of many employers there is a dearth of possibilities. How can this be?
Logic and supply & demand theory dictate that a necessary workforce adjustment should be occurring whereby industry needs are accommodated by a willing and resilient population of workers. Given these atrocious employment times you would think the migration of the unemployed to fill vacancies would be rapid. But it is not, and it is not expected to be anytime soon!
So, what’s going on? At this point in time, I’m seeing two issues:
Matching: Along with just about everything else in the 21st century the nature of work and the needs of industry are quickly changing. For potential employees keeping up with and being prepared for the new, innovative, and hybrid positions now in demand is not being efficiently handled. The skills needed are not possessed by enough workers.
A requirement for any professional is to continuously build knowledge capital. If you snooze you lose. The better you know your industry the less chance you have of being caught unprepared.
But industry too has a responsibility here. Identifying, recruiting, and developing talent creates win-win situations. Succession planning, quality onboarding, and timely training can enhance employees’ careers and company productivity.
Both parties need to do a better job of discovering one another.
Searching: Following from the above point is the issue of how these parties go about finding one another. For many, the value and necessity of networking has just become apparent over the past couple of years. For those who have cultivated a rich set of contacts there is a relative ease in learning about new work opportunities, including the hard-to-fill positions.
Yet, if you are not a great networker, and many people are not, you may be reduced to looking at job boards and other web site postings. I do not have to tell you how frustrating and ineffective that can be.
So, a big part of the problem is that the means of searching for elusive positions are ineffective. Even networking can be hard to apply systematically. Good real-time ready and solution-oriented databases, which are dedicated to critical shortage job positions, are not yet there. If industry marketed more effectively what their hiring needs are in the short and long-term, then I am confident more of the workforce would prepare themselves to fill those gaps.
Adapting to this Recession is difficult in many ways. One of the most egregious is in trying to accept that a) corporations are not allocating huge amounts of cash reserves to hire new workers, and b) that available positions are not being filled because talent is not being found. As a country we are suffering, in part, because we cannot seem to fit square pegs into square holes! Responsibility for remedying this mess should be shared.
Workers, whether employed or not, need to do a better job of tracking industry current trends, projected needs, and best practices. Excelling in a rapidly evolving work environment requires nothing less.
And industry needs to do a much better job of communicating in an accessible way talent and skill inadequacies, which will alert the American worker to this urgency and to where good jobs can be found.
The pace of reconciling America’s unemployment dilemma needs to quicken. It is simply not acceptable for critical shortages and high unemployment to exist simultaneously. Solving this mismatch is everyone’s responsibility.
