Skills Gap Continues to Challenge Manufacturers
President Donald Trump wants to add 25 million new jobs in the national economy by boosting the number of factories in the United States, but he’ll have to work against a powerful headwind, because companies are already struggling to find Americans to fill manufacturing openings.
Numbers from private and public analysts suggest hiring in the U.S. has been brisk. According to survey results from human resources consultancy Randstad Sourceright, companies expect to hire extensively in the coming year to address anticipated growth—41 percent will add workers, compared to 32 percent last year.
But an even greater number see the skills gap impacting their businesses in the future.
Four-fifths of the more than 400 executives surveyed said that a shortage of sufficiently skilled workers will affect their companies in the next 12 months. The most-represented sector in the survey is manufacturing, which Trump calls the “backbone of our economy.”
Complaints of hard-to-fill factory jobs are backed up by Bureau of Labor Statistics data: 324,000 manufacturing spots were open in November, up from 238,000 a year earlier.
“Talent scarcity is a direct result of having a fully-employed workforce, especially in IT-type and other professional-skill jobs,” Randstad Sourceright CEO Rebecca Henderson said, explaining that companies are using immigrants and overseas workers to supplement their workforce. “You fill those gaps using workers that are willing to come to the U.S. and with the right skill set and education, but the other trend you see is to get that work done offshore.”
While the tech sector is offshoring to plug the skills gap, U.S. manufacturers have relied even more heavily on another trend: automation. Large employers are also using contingent workers, who work on-demand, as a way to stay nimble. One-third of companies surveyed predicted that 30 percent of their workforce will be flexible in the next year.
The question now is whether Trump’s policies can overcome that underlying skills gap to create good, lasting work for Americans, or whether new jobs during his tenure will continue to follow the gig economy and automation trends.
Source: Bloomberg