In 2005 my book, The 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis, predicted skilled worker shortages on a global scale. One prominent economist told this author, “I don’t believe in meltdowns!” Today executives ask me, “How do you feel now that your predictions are coming true?”
Yet currently the U.S. unemployment rate remains at 9.7 percent (11 million workers). Over 40 percent or about 6 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer. The average length of joblessness is over 31 weeks, the highest level since record keeping began in 1948.
How can we make sense of this skills and unemployment paradox? Gerald F. Seib noted in his April 2 Wall Street Journal column, “[T]he long-term unemployment problem fits into a long-term pattern in which the old job skills of many Americans no longer match the job requirements in an information-age economy.” An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data on unemployment by educational level points to the same conclusion. The March 2010 rates were consistent with what has been reported since the beginning of the recession. The unemployment rate was 14.5% for high school dropouts, contrasted with 10.8% for high school graduates; 8.2% for those with Associate’s degrees or certificates; and 4.9% for those with Bachelor’s degrees or higher.
In 1950 the majority of U.S. jobs had no special skill requirements. By 2010 about 70 percent of good-paying jobs require specialized education and training beyond high school. This is one of the principal reasons America now faces a “jobless” recovery. The skills of many American no longer match much of the U.S. labor market requirements.
Many economists believe that the only way the U.S. can grow and pay for the entitlement shortfalls and mounting government deficits at the federal, state, and local levels will be through exporting high-value, high-tech products. This means the United States must remain a world leader in research and development and the output of aerospace, IT, nano-tech, bio-tech, new materials, and green technology products and services.
But where are the skilled American workers with the required talent? U. S. manufacturing utilization capacity was 69 percent in February 2010, which is 10.2 percentage points below its average from 1972 to 2009. Yet up to 33 percent of surveyed businesses reported a lack of qualified applicants to fill these jobs. Global economist Morris R. Beschloss states, “Continued avoidance of broadening the base of U.S.-made manufactured products by the current administration will neither utilize existing facilities nor lead to expansion investment.”
Until now U.S. businesses have bridged this skills deficit by using the twin talent safety valves of importing educated workers or exporting high-pay/high-skills jobs wherever they could find a skilled talent pool. These talent safety valves are beginning to fail. Talent supplies are in rapid flux all over the world. The populations of Japan, South Korea, and many European nations are in decline. Two prominent suppliers of skilled workers, India and China, are moving into more sophisticated high-tech manufacturing or IT services and encountering shortages of engineers, scientists, and technicians with the requisite educational preparation due to inadequate standards for institutions of higher learning.
To build a U.S. knowledge economy, we must look beyond short-term thinking and solutions in all sectors of American society. Large parts of the U.S. education system are broken. Top-ranked American colleges and universities remain preeminent. They still attract the world’s most brilliant scholars. In sharp contrast, U.S. elementary and secondary schools largely remain rooted in an outdated 20th-centry labor-market era. Too many students are dropping out, many because they don’t see a connection between what they are learning in school and real life. Too many students are not proficient in math, reading, and writing. They do not receive information about in-demand occupations and the skills required for them. Businesses and schools are largely operating in separate spheres.
In Winning the Global Talent Showdown (2009), I review how community-based organizations (CBOs) in Santa Ana, California; Fargo, North Dakota; Danville, Illinois; Philadelphia, Chicago and many other regions across the United States are the “Gateways to the Future,” building functioning networks of partners from all segments of the community to create new, more open education-to-employment systems. These non-profit organizations are leveraging business-education partnerships into new combinations to meet the long-term talent needs of the United States.
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote, “The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. . . always excelled at decentralized community-building.” We need to build on these past strengths, and we need to do it now.
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