HR News  from Sasha – March  2005.  It's been a while since we talked.  A quick update is in order:  The latest trends:  - more execs retiring, fewer good people to replace them. - employment going up, turnover rising slightly. - customers more demanding than ever. - leadership teams stretched thin, making little progress.

John Eckberg, Cincinnati Enquirer

A national survey is mirrored in the experience of a local public relations exec:  "I once worked for a company, and their concept was to pass on work to fewer people and have to pay less. I was one of the people they laid off to give more work to somebody else."

People are working longer hours, and their jobs are becoming more demanding. On the other hand, employers have become more flexible, and that tends to lessen being overworked. Employees at companies that have gone through layoffs are more likely to be over­worked - 42 percent compared with the 27 percent of those at companies where payrolls remained steady.

In some sense, things are getting worse. The Families and Work Institute found that half of 1,003 workers interviewed said they are often handling too many tasks at the same time or are frequently interrupted during the workday - or both. one in three American workers is chronically overworked. More than a third of workers are not taking their full allotment of vacation time.

Medical assistants  59%
Network systems analysts  57%
Physician assistants  49%
Social and human aide assistants  49%
Home health aides  48%
Medical records  47%
Physical therapist aides  46%
Software engineers, applications  46%
Software engineers, systems software  45%
Physical therapist assistants  45%

Cut and sew apparel manufacturing   -205
Aerospace product/ parts manufacturing   -83
Semiconductor / electronic component mfg   -79
Computer and peripherals manufacturing   -68
Fabric mills   -67
Wired telecomm carriers   -62
Instruments manufacturing   -55
Private household employment   -54
Textile / fabric finishing mills   -42
Pulp, paper and paperboard mills   -42

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with,
but whether it's the same problem you had last year."
~ John Foster Dulles

Need to do something different?   Work with  Sasha Corporation.

The Truth About the Coming Labor Shortage
Summarized from HR Magazine  March 2005

Predictions that the labor supply won't keep up with demand are off base, according to sources at BLS. Such predictions are based on subtracting the total number of future workers from the total number of expected jobs. The calculation shows that by 2012, there will be 3.3 million fewer workers than jobs.

But the two data sets  come from different sources and cannot be compared accurately. BLS's chief for occupational outlook says anyone who subtracts one data set from the other and finds a gap is "totally misrepresenting" the data. He says BLS has tried to correct the misconceptions, but, to date, the agency's efforts have been to no avail.

All told, the number of available workers will exceed the number of jobs. But not every job will have one or more qualified employees available to fill it.

U.S. students fare poorly on math and science achievement. Even in basic English, more than 60 percent of employers rate high-school graduates' skills as fair or poor. More than half of all entering college students never graduate.

In part, employers have worked around our nation's education system by importing immigrants. But the influx of foreign-born talent is slowing.  H-1B visas, set at 195,000 a year during the tech boom, are down to 65,000.

The real gap, then, involves selected skills, not head counts. The question is  whether there will be enough qualified workers on U.S. soil to do the work at an acceptable cost.

There's a large segment of workers and potential workers that don't possess the skills that employers need. We're rolling into the most severe shortage of skilled workers that this country has ever seen. The 90s will pale in comparison to how bad the labor picture is going to be.

Our free market economy always finds a way to adjust to the demand for labor. But competition for human capital seems destined to become more cutthroat. Too many employers say they'll worry about it when it happens. If you wait, you'll get caught flat-footed. The time to plan is now; you can't do it overnight.

For a better way of doing things, contact:
Karl Corbett, President     (513) 232-0002     karl@sashacorp.com     www.sashacorp.com
 

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