Labour shortage becoming ‘desperate’

[DearSummer]

Labour shortage becoming ‘desperate’
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle2330196/

An increasingly “desperate” labour shortage is the main obstacle keeping companies from becoming more competitive.

An aging work force and growing demand for specialized skills means that hundreds of thousands of jobs are going begging despite stubbornly high unemployment, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce concludes in a report being released Wednesday.

The expected shortfall over the next decade or so includes 163,000 construction jobs, 130,000 oil workers, 60,000 nurses, 37,000 truckers, 22,000 hotel workers and 10,000 skilled steel tradespeople.

There are jobs out there. You need to be mobile and willing to retrain if you can't find a job.

[keano]

Yawn. This is the same stuff I have heard for almost 10 years now.

If Harper does raise the age for Canada pension or w/e to 67, I highly doubt the aging workforce will be queueing up to retire...

[Elfer]

There's no labour shortage, there's a severe skills shortage, which is a different issue.

Frankly, companies have created this issue for themselves by eliminating entry-level positions and internal training, and instead trying to recruit experienced candidates externally. I get the feeling that over the next decade or so, the best results will be seen by companies that invested in developing and retaining new talent, even throughout the downturn.

Honestly, the high-pressure, short-term, shareholder driven business model simply doesn't work in the long run. If you cut dollars to training to make your balance sheet look good for the quarter, you're going to feel it a few years down the line when you would have seen the return on those dollars. Individual companies can plan to recruit externally, especially when there is a lot of unemployed skilled labour, but once that pool dries up, you're going to be hard-pressed to find those people if nobody is training them. On top of that, the lack of unemployed skills means that everyone is going to have their previous hires snaked out from under them by other companies who are equally desperate to recruit.

[NorthYorker]

There's no labour shortage, there's a severe skills shortage, which is a different issue.

This thread should be linked to one about "Government salaries". What we're talking about here is a direct consequence of "idiocy of government retaining and retraining it's workforse when private business isn't doing it". Well, strip-mining of labour market goes only so far, at some point you don't have enough skilled candidates because you the CEO invested precisely zero in workforce training.

[Rainne]

Notice how those jobs are difficult to outsource.

Nursing. Construction. Trucking.

Requires physical presence.

[Mark77]

The article, quite frankly, is full of it. For instance, in some fields, there might be a shortage of people to work at $10/hour, but certainly, if the salary is raised to $15/hour, then people naturally would be stimulated to retrain, for example.

I know that in some instances, employers propogate this 'shortage' myth because the have a sense of entitlement to cheap labour. For instance, the fast food industry is hooked on cheap minimum wage positions. I don't think anyone should have the expectation of getting rich working at McDonalds as an employee, but working at McDonalds should be enough to survive. Employers in some sectors, like engineering, also push the 'labour shortage' nonsense because they want foreign guest workers. For example, many employers in the United States receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of job applications from qualified individuals for a single position, yet claim they cannot find workers.

[BananaHunter]

There's an oversupply of people who want a desk job and a shortage of people in the trades. This makes sense. Too many people go to university and not enough people doing the other stuff. This is why it's often not appropriate to generalize the job market as a whole. There are always parts of the job market that are better than others.

I don't think this is an issue with private vs public or CEO not training the workforce. This is simply a cultural phenomenon. Many people think working a desk job is better. There should be more education so that people understand what path is better for them. When I was in high school, there's a general consensus that you're dumb if you don't take the academic route. It would be nice if people choose the right path to begin with, and if there's less stigma associated with non-desk jobs. Households are wasting too much money sending their kids to school only to find out later that they aren't cut out for office life. The only ones benefiting from over education of society are the money sucking universities.

[dibksbgon]

There's an oversupply of people who want a desk job and a shortage of people in the trades. This makes sense. Too many people go to university and not enough people doing the other stuff. This is why it's often not appropriate to generalize the job market as a whole. There are always parts of the job market that are better than others.

I don't think this is an issue with private vs public or CEO not training the workforce. This is simply a cultural phenomenon. Many people think working a desk job is better. There should be more education so that people understand what path is better for them. When I was in high school, there's a general consensus that you're dumb if you don't take the academic route. It would be nice if people choose the right path to begin with, and if there's less stigma associated with non-desk jobs. Households are wasting too much money sending their kids to school only to find out later that they aren't cut out for office life. The only ones benefiting from over education of society are the money sucking universities.

THANK YOU for putting together what I was trying to post in such a less elegant way.

+1

It starts in the younger grades and highschool. The pressure to go to university. University as the only option when there are plenty of other post-secondary education choices that can be made that may be better options for many students who go to university. I just read an excellent quote while reading the comments from this article on the website: "We greatly admire philosophy and disparage plumbing. By the 21st century we will have neither pipes nor theories that hold water."

[JoeyMBA]

We need more MBAs.

[x95zsk]

We need more MBAs.

+1

one of the problems is companies are NOT willing to retrain folks. they used to do this 10 years ago and less likely these days.

[NorthYorker]

The pressure to go to university. University as the only option when there are plenty of other post-secondary education choices that can be made that may be better options for many students who go to university.

There are couple of things you didn't take into account:
1. Employers are asking for degrees even for occupations which don't necessary require one (nursing being an example, instead of diversifying the field health providers decided that all new nurses need degrees).
2. It is a lot easier to retrain B.Sc. into a plumber than to make a decent B.Sc. out of a plumber. So, if you relax artificial barriers a bit (3-years apprenticeship to become a plumber for someone with engineering background? Gimme a break!), a lot of those shortages would disappear pretty quickly.

[dibksbgon]

^
But that proves part of the point. So many people are going and getting BAs BSc and so on and not finding anything and then retraining? Cut the university part out and change the discussion about post-secondary education, ambition, and success. And just because you have a BSc it does not make you any more knowledgeable or a quicker study than someone who started from the beginning training as a plumber or "insert trade here".

[Mark77]

There are couple of things you didn't take into account:
1. Employers are asking for degrees even for occupations which don't necessary require one (nursing being an example, instead of diversifying the field health providers decided that all new nurses need degrees).

I've seen a lot of the opposite. LPN use is increasing rapidly, compared to RNs. Although a lot of LPN people have degrees, even in related fields like Kinesiology, Biology, etc.

2. It is a lot easier to retrain B.Sc. into a plumber than to make a decent B.Sc. out of a plumber. So, if you relax artificial barriers a bit (3-years apprenticeship to become a plumber for someone with engineering background? Gimme a break!), a lot of those shortages would disappear pretty quickly.

An engineer turned into a plumber? Dear Lord. But a lot of union workplaces have fairly strict rules. For instance, the local electric utility refuses to hire new engineering grads to do basically computer programming work, because engineers cannot join unions, while the 'computer programming' function at that particular utility is apparently unionized. So they complain of a shortage of computer programmers, but ignore the engineers that apply, even though they could do the job quite easily.

[Rainne]

There's an oversupply of people who want a desk job and a shortage of people in the trades. This makes sense. Too many people go to university and not enough people doing the other stuff. This is why it's often not appropriate to generalize the job market as a whole. There are always parts of the job market that are better than others.

I don't think this is an issue with private vs public or CEO not training the workforce. This is simply a cultural phenomenon. Many people think working a desk job is better. There should be more education so that people understand what path is better for them. When I was in high school, there's a general consensus that you're dumb if you don't take the academic route. It would be nice if people choose the right path to begin with, and if there's less stigma associated with non-desk jobs. Households are wasting too much money sending their kids to school only to find out later that they aren't cut out for office life. The only ones benefiting from over education of society are the money sucking universities.

Not surprised.

In the age of surfing Facebook, shopping online and streaming videos, kids these days are accustomed to sitting in front of a computer all day.

Nobody actually wants to go out there and get dirty.

Also, no university = dumbass mentality these days doesn't help. University opens a lot of doors, assuming you're in a real ungrad program like Accounting or Engineering with co-op.

[mastercool]

The only thing there is a legitimate shortage of is people willing to work for almost nothing.

Your typical Starbucks or Earls is staffed mostly with post secondary graduates for instance but career jobs? Not so much.