Article

2023-08-29 Economy

America Has a Critical Shortage of Skilled Workers

America’s shortage of skilled workers is impacting the ability of businesses in the construction and manufacturing industries to staff their businesses and complete jobs on time, prompting a search for a new type of talent pipeline for skilled workers to address the shortfall.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics job openings report for June 2023 found that the construction industry had roughly 374,000 job openings while manufacturing had 582,000. While the number of job openings in the two sectors shrank by about 279,000 combined openings compared to a year ago, the total remained near one million job openings for those two sectors out of the roughly 8.5 million open jobs economy-wide.
What about MBAs?

Posted by Grom the Kindly 2023-08-29 06:18|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [11144 views ] Top

#1 Welcome to the world where everyone gets a gold star for just being.

No need for actual learning about, effort in doing or completion of a task, just as long as you feel good about yourself.

Posted by Mullah Richard 2023-08-29 07:05|| 2023-08-29 07:05|| Front Page Top

#2 Businesses have a loathing of training their own labor force. They simply treat labor as a 'cost' rather than an asset. They let the training be handled by outside idiots who have no interest in the goals of business. The public education system is designed to be a feeder to universities and their incomes not the 'trades'.

Posted by Procopius2k 2023-08-29 07:22|| 2023-08-29 07:22|| Front Page Top

#3 Procop, my old employer provided lots of training, mandatory training, mostly on complying with government guidelines or on HR topics.

Posted by Glenmore 2023-08-29 07:42|| 2023-08-29 07:42|| Front Page Top

#4 I used to get big laughs by saying "this company considers customers to be a necessary evil..."

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-08-29 07:43|| 2023-08-29 07:43|| Front Page Top

#5
#4 I used to get big laughs by saying "this company considers customers to be a necessary evil..."
Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-08-29 07:43

...Our philosophy here is that this would be an amazing job if it wasn't for the @#$%^&! customers..

Mike

Posted by MikeKozlowski 2023-08-29 08:03|| 2023-08-29 08:03|| Front Page Top

#6 Somewhat related - Judge's 1959 message to teens

which has gone 'viral', according to Yahoo.

Posted by Bobby 2023-08-29 08:16|| 2023-08-29 08:16|| Front Page Top

#7 Hard to bring back all that offshore manufacturing if there's no place for it to land.

Posted by Skidmark 2023-08-29 09:33|| 2023-08-29 09:33|| Front Page Top

#8 Skills shortage? Nah. At the wages employers want to pay? Yes. Otherwise construction and manufacturing wouldn't have so many unskilled illegal aliens taking those jobs.

Posted by Enver Slager8035 2023-08-29 09:40|| 2023-08-29 09:40|| Front Page Top

#9 /\ Around here it's $200. per day (usually cash) for a ten hour day. No union (as such), no benefits, and no taxes. Sorry, gringos nosotros no contratamos. (We don't hire gringos)

Posted by Besoeker 2023-08-29 09:45|| 2023-08-29 09:45|| Front Page Top

#10 The biggest skills shortages are: Parents, Teachers, Thinkers and doers.

Thieves tramps and thieves we got plenty of mostly in politics.

Posted by AlanC 2023-08-29 10:44|| 2023-08-29 10:44|| Front Page Top

#11 All valid and true points above so let me throw another on the heap.

The Boomers are pretty much retired and that took a huge hunk of skilled workers out of the labor force and there isn't enough new ones to make up the shortfall.

Along with that, Texas is growing like crazy in population and manufacturing and a lot of those skilled people in the workforce are reading there, leaving California and the midwest lacking and hurting for skilled employees.

We need to import more skilled (less illegal) labor and figure out how to automate a lot of this until things stabilize around 2045.

Posted by DarthVader 2023-08-29 11:50|| 2023-08-29 11:50|| Front Page Top

#12 A sane immigration policy would close the borders, deport the chaff and worthless grifters, and define the influx on national skill needs. Wow, what a concept. Of course, since the KSA's most in demand will produce a huge percentage of those who fit actual need as white and Asian it will never happen.

Posted by NoMoreBS 2023-08-29 12:15|| 2023-08-29 12:15|| Front Page Top

#13 Yes, but what about providing jobs for BA-credentialed white women in air-conditioned offices where they can write Emails to each other all day? Priorities, people!!

Posted by Tom 2023-08-29 14:40|| 2023-08-29 14:40|| Front Page Top

#14 As a retired skilled guy, I can tell you that the biggest obstacle to getting skilled workers is the employers. What they want is just barely competent to do the job, as long as somebody keeps an eye on them.
What the pres of one of my last jobs told me was, "Train them, but not too much. Then they want a raise."
I am totally serious here.

Posted by ed in texas 2023-08-29 20:18|| 2023-08-29 20:18|| Front Page Top

#15 Near constant layoffs and hours reductions help very little.

Posted by badanov 2023-08-29 20:25|| 2023-08-29 20:25|| Front Page Top

#16 Employers like to train h1b’s over non-h1bs because the H1b’s cannot leave quickly once trained.

Posted by Airandee 2023-08-29 20:28|| 2023-08-29 20:28|| Front Page Top

#17 Employers like to train h1b’s over non-h1bs because the H1b’s cannot leave quickly once trained.

Even worse. Silicon valley would hire trained Americans to build a network/website/database (or all three) and once it was working, lay them all off and bring in H1Bs to maintain it at 1/3 the cost.

Posted by DarthVader 2023-08-29 21:33|| 2023-08-29 21:33|| Front Page Top

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