Are you worried about your next generation of leaders? You’re not alone. According to a new survey from Pearson and Executive Development Associates (EDA), 57 percent of business leaders said their leadership talent pipeline was the same or weaker today than it was two years ago. Seventy-five percent said increasing bench strength will be their top business priority for the next two to three years.
Is this too little too effort? When asked what skills were needed to assume executive positions within the next three to five years, respondents cited strategic thinking, leading change, the ability to create a vision and engage others around it, the ability to inspire, and the ability to understand how the total enterprise works. But the respondents also agreed these were the very skills lacking in their current talent pool.
The war for healthcare workers is about to heat up. According to a survey of 285 hospital chief executive officers conducted by AMN Healthcare, most hospital CEOs plan in the next six months plan to maintain or even increase recruitment of healthcare professionals. Ninety-three percent expect to maintain or increase physician recruiting efforts, 89 percent expect to maintain or increase nurse recruiting efforts, 91 percent expect to maintain or increase allied healthcare professional recruiting efforts, and 93 percent expect to maintain or increase pharmacist recruiting efforts.
AMN, the nation's largest healthcare staffing company, reported that 95 percent of hospital CEOs said there is a shortage of physicians in the U.S., 91 percent said there is a shortage of nurses, 86 percent said there is a shortage of pharmacists, and 79 percent said there is a shortage of allied healthcare professionals.
Moreover, many CEOs believe there are not enough healthcare workers in their areas to meet the increased demand for medical services that universal access to care would create. Seventy percent said there would not be enough doctors to meet demand if access becomes universal, 51 percent said there would not be enough nurses, 48 percent said there would not be enough allied healthcare professionals and 45 percent said there would not be enough pharmacists.
What skills students need is a burning question being debated in board rooms, classrooms, and think tanks. But what skills are needed is only part of the story and part of the solution. The potentially bigger challenge - the elephant in the room - is how to teach them. And the problem isn't only methodology. In this video, you will see how our current 180-day school year is riddled with distractions, disruptions, and interruptions. After viewing this, what do you think needs to happen to ensure our young people get the skills they need to compete in tomorrow's workforce?
On Friday,the Labor Department announced other uptick in unemployment. The announcement coincided with the arrival in my inbox of alerts of potentially significant skilled worker shortages. How can that be? With over 15 million people unemployed and another nearly 10 million people under-employed (not counting those people who just stopped looking) how can we be talking labor shortages?
The answer is really quite simple. In the late 1990s, many people (including yours truly) fell prey to the theory that we could continue to create jobs at a rate greater than our ability to find people to fill them. For many reasons including a combination of the Great Recession and technology that didn't happen nor is it likely to. HOWEVER, that doesn't alleviate a shortage of labor.
By the early years of this decade, most of us realized that the gap wasn't one of quantity but quality. Even today with approximately 7 people available to fill every open job, many employers are unable to find qualified employees.
For example, as the outbreak of H1N1 spreads, U.S. laboratories will see a big surge in their testing workload, according to the American Society for Clinical Pathology. A large spike in swine flu screenings could clog a lab system already struggling with a shortage of workers, the ASCP said. Citing federal statistics, the ASCP said that 138,000 new laboratory professionals will be needed nationwide by 2012, but fewer than 50,000 will be trained. California and other Far West states are weathering a 53 percent shortage of medical technologists in hospitals, commercial labs and other diagnostic facilities; followed by 46 percent in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, and 42 percent in the Northeast.
At just about the same time, I read how reverse immigration was a trend the U.S. was beginning to experience. While that should bring relief to many people, it may not bode well for the U.S. future. While the U.S. was losing its global dominance as the land of opportunity and the fortunes and futures of China and India improved, the U.S. has started to lose many of its best and brightest workers. While only constituting 12% of the U.S. population, immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley's technology companies and contributed to more than 25% of our global patents. They make up 24% of the U.S. science and engineering workforce holding bachelor's degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. Immigrants have co-founded firms such as Google, Intel, eBay, and Yahoo!. While we may not need all these workers right now, we will need skilled, talented, and highly educated workers to help us recover.
The third example, but not definitely not the last of shortages to come, had to do with the likelihood that we will run out of hospital beds should H1N1 affect 35 percent of the population. (While that might seem almost surrealistic, that number is not far-flung should efforts to prevent a pandemic outbreak fail.) What does hospital beds have to do with labor? The beds are just a symptom. The entire health care system is already strained. When an H1N1 outbreak occurs, health care labor shortages will only be exaggerated. Shortages already exist for skilled workers in the Emergency Rooms and Critical Care Units. Vacancies exist almost universally in the U.S. for primary care providers. Openings exist in nearly every hospital and medical practice for nurses, assistants, and technicians. And health care providers aren't immune to the flu either. What happens when they get sick or call off to take care of family?
On top of all that during the first half of 2009, local health departments cut about 8,000 staff positions. In 2008, an estimated 7,000 public health jobs were eliminated. From 2005 to 2009, federal public health preparedness funding was slashed by 25%.
The Perfect Labor Storm is far from over. Despite high unemployment, serious gaps exist in our ability to fill all the job positions available, many critical to the health and well-being of our economy and citizens.
Sadly, the answer is no.
Our economy requires that most workers have at least some postsecondary education or occupational training to be ready for current and future jobs in the global marketplace. But, more than 88 million working age adults have at least one major educational barrier—no high school diploma, no college, or English as a Second Language (ESL) needs. With a current U.S. labor force of about 150 million (16 and older), a troubling number of prime working age adults likely will fall behind in their struggle to get higher wage jobs, or to qualify for the college courses or job training that will help them join or advance in jobs that pay a family-sustaining wage.
A corollary to this scenario is putting our nation in a dangerous and potentially catastrophic situation. With so many people possessing so few skills, is government and industry dumping billions of dollars to create jobs at a level to meet the talent supply or to meet the marketplace’s demand?
Forty percent of our workforce is at a level of literacy achievement or literacy attainment that falls below what one would reasonably think would be success in a workplace. Up to this point, many of these individuals have made it with their extraordinary and admirable adaptive strategies. Give them an “A” for effort and imagination. We all hear and see examples of those on almost a daily basis if you have any contact with people.
But what happens in a dislocating economy with a lot of change? A lot of people lose their job in which they have developed those adaptive behaviors and now they are forced to find a new job. How many employees are now being asked to fill out a job application for the first time in 10, 20, or even 30 years. That’s when literacy deficits come to the foreground and really impair a significant segment of working age adults to connect. It's in times of disruption, of market change, when business is shifting from one market segment to another market segment or adding new product mix, that literacy deficits among workers come very fast to the foreground.
In the U.S., 30 million people over age 16 — 14 percent of the country’s adult population — don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level, understand the directions on an over-the-counter cold medicine package, or “interpret” the times on a bus schedule? How can we create jobs that will produce products and services faster and better than other countries when nearly 1 out of 7 working age adults can’t even fill out the job application?
Basic adult literacy can be defined as the ability to comprehend and use written and printed material. There are basically three types of literacy: prose, document, and quantitative. Prose requires ability to read continuous texts like editorials, text that is written in paragraphs and discourse and long sentences. Document literacy, on the other hand, rely on non-continuous texts. Documents often contain just a single word or a phrase and lot of blank spaces and then they display information symbolically using graphical and special arrangements like graphs and tables and charts and so forth. Quantitative literacy is the ability to use numbers that are embedded in either prose or documents and do something with those numbers. By the way, this is different than numeracy literacy which, in addition to quantitative literacy skills, requires the ability to use formulas or have knowledge of algebra and geometry. When we talk about basic literacy, we are talking about bare-bone basics – reading the time on a train schedule and understanding what it means.
Here is an example of how low we’ve placed the bar when we’re talking about basic literacy – and how many people don’t meet this standard.
Imagine yourself making a purchase and the cashier hands you a rebate coupon. To qualify for the rebate, the individual must write his/her name and address into the proper boxes on the form. To do this, the person must scan the document for the appropriate rows – name, street and number and PO, state and zip code. To perform this task correctly, you have to search the coupon…this is a form of a document. You have to have some vocabulary knowledge. You have to understand what zip code meant. You have to understand the meaning of abbreviations like P.O.
Incredibly, a recent study by National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only 8% of adults in the below basic and about a little bit more than half of adults at the basic levels were able to perform a similar task successfully. About 35% of adults were not able to provide a correct response at all. This translates to about 80 million people. And important to note, the respondents or participants in the study were not penalized for misspelling!
What this means for employers and our nation as a whole is that about 45 percent of adults, approximately 90 million adults, in the U.S. don’t have even basic skills in reading, math, and other English skill levels to fulfill their roles as workers, according to a report released by the National Council of State Directors of Adult Education.
To make matters worse, more than two-thirds of these adults lacking basic skills fall beyond the reach of programs to help them. And Federal adult education, training, and English language programs, currently being squeezed or closed due to budget cuts, reach only about 3 million adults a year.
Our current adult education system—designed for an agrarian and industrial society—is not equipped to address this urgent national need. Nearly 1 out of every 3 students in the U.S. drops out of high school each year. That’s more than 1.2 million people who expect to enter the workforce sometime in their life without basic literacy skills, no less any special skills. The U.S. is the only country among the 30 OECD free-market countries where young adults are less educated than the previous generation. We are losing our competitive ground to other countries in educational attainment at time that two-thirds of all the jobs created over the next decade will require a college degree (unless our stimulus dollars go to creating low-level jobs for the sole purpose of reducing the short term unemployment rate and not long-term productivity and sustainability.
The bottom line is this: Adult low literacy be connected to almost every socio-economic issue in the United States:
My advice to employers is simple.
1. Before hiring, test candidates on basic literacy and work skills. Sadly, education and previous employment does not ensure basic adult literacy even if the employee has somehow accommodated and adapted to perform basic tasks.
2. Test your current workforce. Identify those hard-working, well-intentioned people who not only struggle through life but also insidiously add to your costs in the form of mistakes, lower productivity, accidents and health care expenses.
3. Ask the questions: as you adapt to new markets, will your employees be able to respond? Even if all your employees pass the basic literacy and office skills requirements, how will they perform at the intermediate and advanced levels that you will need in the future?
And finally, if not most importantly - get involved in your community. Mentor, volunteer, and/or financially support literacy programs. Our future depends on it.
Recently released Department of Labor data show that fishermen (and fisherwomen) and other workers in fishing-related professions were the most likely to die on the job in 2008. Of 39,000 fishing workers in the nation, 50 were killed, a rate of 128.9 per 100,000 full-time workers.
Logging workers and aircraft pilots have the second and third deadliest jobs. Eighty-two loggers died last year from work injuries, some of them caused by falling trees and malfunctioning cutting equipment. Ninety aircraft pilots died in crashes and other accidents. Transportation incidents are the most common cause of fatalities, overall. This year, 40.5% of the worker deaths, 2,053 of them, were transportation-related.
While putting in 57% of the total hours worked by Americans, men made up 92.7% of the workplace fatalities. The relatively few women killed were more likely to die from on-the-job homicide, though: 26% of the female workplace deaths were murders, compared with only 9% of the male deaths.
To read more, America's Deadliest Jobs - Forbes.com.