America's Skilled Trades Dilemma: Shortages Loom As Most-In-Demand Group Of Workers Ages
For the last three years, according to ManpowerGroup, the hardest segment of the workforce for employers to staff with skilled talent hasn’t been registered nurses or engineers or even web developers. It’s been the skilled trades – the welders, electricians, machinists, etc. that are so prevalent in manufacturing and construction.
But if these skilled-trades workers are difficult to find now, as Manpower MAN -0.37%’s survey indicates, just wait a few years. The skills gap is likely to become more acute.
The heavy proportion of older skilled-trade workers puts into focus more than just the pending retirement for baby boomers and oft-cited but rarely quantified gap between the skills that employers need and available workers possess. It also touches on the fact that American high schools have largely shifted their focus to preparing students for four-year colleges rather than vocational school.
(Teachers' unions are as strong a super PAC for democrats as are the media)
But just as training to become a welder or computer controlled machine operator isn’t for everyone, pursuing a college degree doesn’t fit every student’s skill set.
“For two or three generations, the focus has been to go to college, get a degree and in doing so you will ensure a brighter future with more access to employment,” Genevieve Stevens, interim dean for instruction at Houston Community College’s central campus, told the Houston Chronicle. “We started focusing on academic instruction, but left behind the notion of work-force education. However, in a two-year institution that costs less, the average work-force student can come out of that program with skills to gain immediate employmen [1]
The way I see it, what good is a "shovel ready" job when the youth won't even pick up that shovel? And, as the skilled workforce is dominated by 55+ yr olds, WHO will be constructing our buildings 15-20 yrs from now; let alone maintain them? America is not on solid ground in any way at all.
[1] Condensed from:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emsi/2013/03/07/americas-skilled-trades-dilemma-shortages-loom-as-most-in-demand-group-of-workers-ages/
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