Shortage of skilled workers as baby boomers retire predicted

[steven johnson]

There is a shortage of skilled workers in some areas even now and that trend is predicted to worsen.

http://www.enterprisenewspapers.com/article/20100301/BIZ/703019925/0/ETPZoneLT

A report released today indicates that within a decade, the employment tide will turn big-time. By 2018, it says, people won't be hunting for jobs; instead, employers will be hunting for employees. That's because baby boomers will be retiring, causing perhaps 5 million job vacancies.

The report, "After the Recovery: Help Needed -- The Coming Labor Shortage and How People in Encore Careers Can Help Solve it," is by Barry Bluestone, dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University and Mark Melnik, deputy director for research at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. It assumes a return to healthy economic growth, no change in immigration or labor force participation rates, and boomers retiring at the same rate and age as older workers are retiring now.

About half the vacancies are expected to be in education, health care, government and nonprofit organizations, the report says. It suggests that boomers can help fill that gap by working lextra years in so-called "encore careers".

Jobs likely to provide the largest number of openings: registered nurse, home health aide, personal and home care aide, nursing aide, orderly and medical attendant, medical assistant, licensed practical and vocational nurse, medical and health service manager, teacher, teacher assistant, child care worker, business operations specialist, general and operations manager, receptionist and information clerk, clergy, social and human services assistant.


Instead of a lack of jobs, too many jobs in the future

[Warpy]

1. Civil service will also be hit really, really hard

as those of us who have been in the system for years and know all the ins and outs start to retire.

I'm afraid the most despised generation in the history of this country is going to be missed, after all.

[westerebus]

6. Are the X, Y, and Z generations leaving the planet?

:shrug: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Warpy]

7. It's going to take YEARS to bring them up to speed

Remember, these are the social promotion generations.

[westerebus]

9. Warpy.

I think you have mastered the fine art of understatement. :toast:

[Raineyb]

20. Speak for yourself.

There's not a damn thing wrong with MY brain and I managed to get promoted on my merits thank you very much.

[Eric J in MN]

2. In the late 1990s, there were lots of articles saying that...

...there was a shortage of computer programmers, and so we neede more H1B-visas. The software industry pushed that story.

But I knew from my own experience of going to job interviews (as well as from the statistic of the small inflation of computer programmer salaries) that there was no shortage.

[valerief]

5. That's EXACTLY what I remember, too. More off-shoring to come. nt

[blue97keet]

8. The bogus shortage shouting continues

Remember the engineering crash of 1970?

[valerief]

13. No, too young and stupid for that. n/t

[geckosfeet]

3. Oh goody - "encore careers". A euphemism for "Retirement? Ha ha Ha ha!"

[Kat45]

4. Financially, a lot of boomers will not be able to retire.

Sure, the folks in government jobs should be able to, as should high earners. But lots of us boomers do not have pensions, and many of those with 401Ks lost much of their retirement nest egg in the financial crash. And those in low wage jobs never had the money to put away for retirement. It's not like our parents generation, when people worked for one company throughout their lives and retired with pensions that gave them a decent regular check. My guess is that most job vacancies won't be due to retirement, but will be due to companies shedding their higher cost older workers, who will then be competing with the younger people for the open jobs.

[Odin2005]

10. Euphemism for "Oh no, the price of labor will go up! THE HORROR!!!"

Can't let people get paid more! :eyes:

[stevebreeze]

16. what an f'in tragedy!!!

[upi402]

11. H1B's will get easier n/t

[AnneD]

12. I can only speak for this old Nurse....

but I will be able to hang up these Crocs real soon. Once I do, there will be no looking back. I took a as a School Nurse shortly into my career. It was a $10,000K cut in pay (now $20-$30 K difference). The schedule allowed me to spend more time with my young daughter and I made up some of the difference by working PRN during the summers. The reward for this is that I have one of those increasingly rare defined benefits pensions plus what I have set aside.

The school district is having a harder and harder time to fill School Nurse positions-the pay has not kept up and younger Nurses won't put up with all the $*%# that is going on in education today and the older Nurses are tired of the abuse heaped on them by hospitals. I will be able to retire with full pension while I am under 60. I will be debt free this year and am preparing to start my own business. When I leave I will have my own business (paid for) and that money will be just gravy. Hubby is in the same situation but he already has his business (all paid for) going on and it it doing well. He basically just works for insurance.

Encore career my ass. I have eaten enough shit sandwiches to last me the rest of my life.

[jtuck004]

14. If they are retiring, they are working now. We have about 27 million

people unemployed. A lot of the jobs in that list are paid for by taxes which are not being paid by these unemployed people, with state budgets in the dump. There is no impetus for rehiring, companies are still laying people off, and rather than creating the 150,000 or so jobs we need every month just to stay even, we are still in negative territory. Until demand picks up, or there is WAY more stimulus, companies won't be hiring.

He does state a big qualifier - AFTER the recovery. Which, until we get down to 5% unemployment or so, is not
going to be helping this vast group. We may see 8% or worse unemployment out to 2020.

His report sounds a little like the BLS projections - too rosy for reality.

I hope I'm wrong.

[ixion]

15. Hmmm... you can't have it both ways... corporate culture is such

that older workers are down-sized or layed off, to be replaced by younger workers at a cheaper wage.

So which is it?

That said, I would LOVE to see such a saturated job market. :)

[Hello_Kitty]

17. The next excuse for importing cheap labor.

Ignore that the children of the Boomers are actually a LARGER number than they are.

[notesdev]

18. Ah ha that's a good one

"as Baby Boomers retire"... boy, people really have no idea what shape this country is really in, do they?

[malakai2]

19. That's great

Encore careers, I mean. Rather than provide opportunities for young people to step into these positions and develop, we'll continue staffing them with boomers and foreclose on opportunities for generatations X and Y. In my experience, just moving past the grad school/unpaid intern/temp/term/unemployed phase to get into a permanent position required the better part of a decade. There is nothing about the position I finally got that I would not have been able to do way back at the beginning of the past decade. All that really changed was the boomer who had held the position for 20 years accepted a promotion, creating a vacancy that could not be filled by assigning those duties to other boomers in the office.

I am not surprised that essentially requiring younger generations to complete a lengthy obstacle course after college to "prove" they can do the work, after which they still need to wait for a vacancy to open up, does not lend itself to filling future staffing needs in careers that do not pay well or offer benefits that may not be there when they're needed. It does create sort of a standing crop of hungry (HR speak for the more appropriate "desperate") applicants for positions that do open up, but by that point most of the hungry applicants are overqualified for the entry level positions. Then comes the outsourcing, which also does not address the future staffing needs in domestic offices. HR responds by retaining retirees on reduced schedules or as consultants, and we get articles like this one.