A couple of points (one of which has already been addressed):

1) IMHO, there will be severe shortages in areas where you see the compensation of those performing the work and those looking for the performers quickly and seriously increasing. (I haven’t seen that since the Dot.com Era.)

2) When someone uses jargony words like “talent” for “people” or “war” for “same-old, same-old”, or “associate” for “wage-slave” or “opportunity” for “no-pay”, there is a reasonable likelihood that someone in a $1,500 suit and an $80 haircut is going to try and sell you or get you to do something very costly. We should remember that much of employment practices today are based on the “GAFI Principles”:
Greed, Arrogance, Fear, and Ignorance.
So, watch out for the hype and watch your wallet!

Cheers,

Keith

If you start raising your wages and improving working conditions –and continue to do so– eventually you’ll have people lining up around the block to work for you even if you need to have huge piles of steaming manure hand-scooped on a blazing summer afternoon.

One more thing…
With the majority of retirement accounts down 50% or more, people entering retirement age are being forced to work well into their sunset years. So, you won’t be getting a worker shortage anytime soon due to retirees exiting the workforce. You’ll have all the workers you need if you start raising wages, increasing benefits and better working conditions!

In the Manpower global survey on the talent shortage, it was determined that the top 10 most difficult jobs to fulfill are skilled manual trades, sales representatives, technicians (primarily production/operations, engineering or maintenance), engineers, management/executives, laborers, office support staff, drivers, account & finance and IT staff (primarily programmers/developers). More than half require specialized knowledge and training. Within our own Sendouts open job database, the majority of open jobs are in the medical profession, IT, engineers, or accounting/finance. The point is that other factors such as a shortage of experienced talent are available – either they don’t have the practical experience or they are taking another path. Case and point, I know a number of people who have graduated from med school. Some have even completed their residency and passed the boards. Instead of working in the medical field, they are working for a top 3 financial services firm or a pharma company. Why? They are seriously in debt from student loans; it’s too expensive to actually practice medicine with today’s medical liability; and, quite frankly, they can easily have a six-figure without a lot less stress.

The point being that the talent shortage – myth or not – needs more detailed research, trending data and a whole lot more analysis. While I’m a fan of Kevin’s articles, he tackled a topic that would take a Herculean effort to explore and explain.

As an aside, didn’t a brilliant ERE author just say this in a revolutionary article just a few weeks ago? (See URL below…) See? We do agree on so much.

Enjoy the sumer Kevin!

H

http://www.ere.net/2008/06/17/a-war-for-talent-as-we-say-in-brooklyn-forgetaboutit/

How about it, Chris — what specifically about Kevin’s article is out of touch and why do you think so? What facts support your opinion?

I’m a classic baby-boomer, potential retiree–should I plan on working until I’m 75-85, according to the projections in your latest article? Did you pass basic gradeschool math?

Finally someone is putting it out there with facts and a little opinion.

You said:
“I am a believer that when the time is right, the solution appears. If organizations were really feeling the pain of shortages, they would have started training programs, raised wages, and lobbied educational institutions to change curricula. None of those things have happened on a wide scale.”

I couldn’t agree with you more on this.

However….

The shortage of jobs will create a change in students choices for degrees. This in turn could create a good thing. Less folks trained in an area – say IT, could spawn more need for folks that know IT.

I do wonder a bit about the urban/rural issue. I can’t cite statistics, but it seems like I’ve heard some of the fastest growing and most popular areas are smaller cities that didn’t even used to really qualify to be called cities. Prime examples being some college towns, like Austin, TX; Chapel Hill, NC; or my home town of Bloomington, IN.

These new cities offer attractive lifestyles for professionals and serve large rural populations.

Much of the allure of the biggest cities is what I call the “Chinese menu” illusion. A Chinese restaurant with 150 items on the menu may seem better than one with 15, though the 15 are the only ones most non-Asians will eat.

So a city with 10,000 restaurants, bars, etc. seems better than one with 1,000, though nobody eats at 10,000 restaurants or drinks at 10,000 bars (right?).

Some people like to be assured they have overwhelming numbers of choices rather than be assured the quality of the choices is good, if the quantity is less.

In recruiting for these less popular areas, it would seem important to learn as much as possible about the benefits of living there and be able to sell it effectively.

Find out what people value most in big-city amenities and be able to pitch the local equivalents. E.g., “so the opera’s not the Met; there is a local opera theater company with x productions a year, plus y traveling productions.”

George’s Employment Blawg
http://www.employmentblawg.com

Normally I enjoy and get a lot of value out of your writing. This one frustrates me because – even if your last sentence clears up the mess – it propogates an unbelievably common abuse of the English language.

Grrr….. Again, the confusion of Talent with Skills.

According to Princeton:

Talent = a person who possesses unusual innate ability in some field or activity

Skill = ability to produce solutions in some problem domain

We have always had a Talent shortage because “people who possess unusual innate ability” are by definition rare. Once they are not rare, it is no longer Talent….

Skills shortages come and ago. We all know that technology marches relentlessly forward and the highly sought Cobol programmer of 1980 has little employ today. Your article goes to great length to state the obvious.

Best Regards,

Edward Caulfield