Manpower Skills Shortages: Ongoing Loss of Human Capital

Worldwide, skilled trades positions are the hardest to fill, according to Manpower global 2010 Talent Shortage Survey of 35,000 employers across 36 countries and territories (PDF); in 31 countries they are among top 10 jobs that companies are having difficulty filling. Shortages of skilled workers are acute in many of the world’s biggest economies. In 15 countries, including the United States, Germany, France, Italy and Canada employers ranked skilled trades as their number one hiring challenge. In Poland employers are also struggling to find skilled trades workers, admitting since three years that they represent the 1st most difficult position to fill, as show the results of three consecutive editions of Manpower’s Talent Shortage Survey. _Source

Even if economic demand improved so as to require the building of significant new infrastructure, most nations lack the necessary manpower skills to rapidly ramp up construction, development, and production.

Australia is one of the countries feeling the strongest pinch, with a healthy mining sector and unemployment near 5%. But Germany is also coming to grips with a manpower shortage, exacerbated by a rapid demographic aging.

The US -- with it's perpetual ongoing Obama recession -- has far less current demand for skilled labour. Real US unemployment is well into the teens, with underemployment into the twenties. In Obama's US, the demand simply isn't there. But what if the economy were to revive itself by some miracle -- even under the Obama regime? Where would the skilled workers come from?

The US educational system has been a disastrous failure from the standpoint of training skilled workers in the crucial trades -- the foundations of an advanced high-tech infrastructure. By attempting to channel all students into a 4 year college track -- and neglecting the trades -- US schools have wasted the potential talent of generations of students. As the US educational establishment becomes further ossified under the control of a massive incestuous political machine involving public sector unions and ideologues at both the federal level and the university school of education level, any hope for salvaging the newer generations of prospective skilled work is slipping through the US' fingers.

As baby boomers retire, massive numbers of skilled workers will be lost to an infrastructure that is already suffering for lack of skills.

The problem is that the requirements for skilled jobs tend to change as the underlying technology changes. One cannot train for a skilled job and expect for the job to stay the same. In addition, the economics of domestic production or construction vs. outsourcing work is apt to change from year to year -- making it tougher for managers to plan their infrastructure into the future.

Under the Obama administration's distinctly anti-business regime, this planning task is made 10 X more difficult for managers than it needed to be. As a result, new projects are put on indefinite hold, and the economy goes into a long-term stasis.

Since industry training and industry-sponsored training provide a significant proportion of skilled workers, as industries down-size and postpone their new projects, the training of skilled workers also suffers.

All of these problems add up, so that when a more rational governmental regime finally falls into place, the nation at large has far fewer skills in place to take advantage of a new building phase, should it occur. The skills must be imported at a higher cost -- financially and socially.

In terms of peak oil or peak energy, it is actually peak manpower which should be feared the most. For as soon as the energy starvation regime of the Obamas, the Boxers, the Pelosis, the Salazars, and that ugly ilk is eliminated, the energy resources that have been there all along will still be there -- but will be less obtainable for the loss of skilled manpower that has occurred in the interim.

All-around skilled craftsmen and craftswomen are becoming more rare in the US -- although Canada, Australia, and some European nations are taking active steps to ameliorate the problem. As the world emerges from its carbon hysteria and peak energy fogs, it will be the nations that can solve the peak skills problem which will prosper.

As for all of those PhD's in queer ethnic studies and semiotic basket-weaving -- what are they doing now?