Keep Your Business Swimming When the Talent Pool Dries Up
03/05/07
Are you prepared for the growing talent shortage, which will become more acute and widespread across more jobs in the next 10 years? Will your healthy company today find itself in trouble tomorrow due to the talent crunch? Savvy human resource professionals and business owners responsible for keeping their personnel resources appropriately stocked are taking action now to counteract this impending trend. Make sure you plan to do what’s necessary to keep your business afloat during this potential threat to your prosperity.
Today your business is robust, healthy and staffed with qualified, educated and skilled personnel. Next year, if you don’t take measures to counteract a growing talent shortage trend, you may find it in a reverse, and threatening, position.
According to a recent study, there is already a talent shortage in many areas of the global labor force that will grow more acute and widespread across more jobs in the next 10 years.1 By 2010, a shortfall of 10 million workers is projected in the United States alone.2
Learn how shortages occur
Many factors have led us to this juncture. Demographic shifts, including aging populations, declining birthrates and economic migration play a major role. There’s also social evolution, inadequate educational programs, globalization and entrepreneurial practices, including outsourcing, offshoring and on-demand employment.
As a result of technological advances and productivity gains, many low-skill routine jobs are being eliminated and once in-demand skills are rapidly becoming obsolete. This reduces demand for some jobs, but it also leaves employees potentially jobless, and both individuals and their labor representatives must act to ensure they take advantage of all available opportunities for re-skilling and retraining.
Be resource-full
As a professional responsible for your company’s human resources management and administration, there are actions you can start to take immediately to prepare your organization to meet the inevitable talent crunch that’s already pervading the workplace.
Tap into underemployed sources to fill slots
Your company may have a wealth of unemployed or underemployed people at your disposal who could be brought into or back into the labor force. They include jobless youth, single mothers, disabled persons, part-time workers who would prefer full-time positions, and older workers who want or need to work longer.
Invest in training and development
You, as an employer, may need to invest more in work-based vocational and technical training, to develop your own homegrown pool of suitably qualified talent. Although many employers view training as too costly or as just window dressing, this will no longer be an attitude they can afford to take in the talent-challenged future.
Re-skill and up-skill to avoid heavy turnover
Before you incur talent shortages, you should give careful and timely thought to re-skilling and up-skilling individuals in redundant or obsolete roles to fill newly created positions. You’ll need to do all you can to retain your potentially useful and adaptable talent, because it is costly to lay off employees with obsolete skills one day and then rehire those with the appropriate skills the next.
Redesign jobs to improve efficiency
By reducing the amount of nonessential work for highly skilled talent, you can enhance their productivity and reduce the total demand for the number of people needed in those positions. Redesigning jobs can help you accomplish your ultimate goal of higher efficiency.
Consider these and other measures to help you keep your business swimming when the talent pool dries up.
1Source: “Confronting the Coming Talent Crunch: What’s Next?” a Manpower Inc. white paper, February 2006.
2Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.