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Skilled worker shortage looms
1/25/2007
Business Review
By Mark Fellows mfellows@mbusinessreview.com
Education and training -- together with underskilled, minority and even
immigrant labor -- will need to be better tapped to handle a coming labor
shortage.
That's the assessment of Jonas Prising, president of Manpower Inc.'s North
American operations, during a recent western Michigan visit.
"This is not a local problem," Prising stressed. "The driving forces
behind this are truly national and global."
A shortfall of 10 million workers by 2010 in the United States is
projected by the U.S. Department of Labor, he said.
The country is just a few years away from wholesale retirements of baby
boomers, he explained, which promise to deplete the work force between 20
and 30 percent by the time they ebb.
Surveys show that perhaps 40 percent of employers already have difficulty
filling certain positions, Prising said.
A nationwide Manpower survey last fall found that 51 percent of durable
goods manufacturers said they have difficulty finding qualified
professional candidates.
Continued job losses notwithstanding, even western Michigan will feel the
pinch. Some 14,000 manufacturing positions will open up in the region in
the next five years, predicted Randy Thelen, president of Zeeland-based
economic development group Lakeshore Advantage.
Yet an increasingly skills-based world-wide work force promises to isolate
those with few skills, Prising said. Employers and governments will have
to find ways to bring those workers back into the work force, he said.
The educational system will need to be better aligned with society's need
for trained workers, he said. Developing countries, including China and
India, already are mobilizing their political and social resources to
produce skilled workers and pose a real challenge to the United States and
other western countries.
With an increasingly mobile economy, he said, work skills are "truly the
only job security an individual can count on."
©2007 BDW
© 2007 Michigan Live. All Rights Reserved
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