Employers desperate for skilled workers
TOKYO: Employers around the world are increasingly desperate for plumbers, welders and other technical workers, Manpower, the U.S. employment services company, said in an annual survey.
The survey, which will be formally released Tuesday and covered nearly 43,000 employers in 32 countries, found a shortfall almost everywhere for tradespeople and similarly skilled, but not necessarily highly educated, positions.
“Weve grown up and others have grown up talking about the knowledge environment, and parents are encouraging their children to go to college and get ahead,” Manpowers chief executive, Jeffrey Joerres, said in a telephone interview. “What is happening is that it is leaving a major void.”
Although Western Europe has been concerned about the eastward expansion of the European Union and the potential for a flood of Polish plumbers and other trades workers heading west, the survey found that many Western European countries had the most acute shortages in such skilled jobs.
Joerres said employers across the world were desperate to fill such positions, including factory and maintenance technicians, which rely on detailed skills obtained over many years.
“They basically would say: As many technicians as you have, we will take - or as many IT programmers or engineers. So we clearly feel the intensity of these sort of skill shortages,” he said about the impact on his business.
Joerres said that schools had scaled back trade training in response to declining demand but that this trend had gone too far, with schools no longer offering the technical training that once inspired teenagers to work with their hands.
Such jobs are now attractive career choices, not least because they can not be outsourced to the other side of the world, he said.
“You cant be a plumber in New York City and live in Bangalore,” Joerres said.
He added that the lengthy training required for such jobs would make it hard to fill the gaps.
The jobs may not be glamorous by modern standards, he said, but they pay well and offer the possibility of owning a business.
At the same time, however, the overall proportion of employers who cannot hire the people they want fell to 31 percent from 41 percent last year, the survey found, largely reflecting the U.S. slowdown.
In the United States, the proportion of employers reporting difficulty filling positions nearly halved to 22 percent in this years survey, undertaken in late January, from 41 percent last year.
But Joerres played down the significance of economic weakness, pointing out that the proportion of Japanese employers reporting difficulty finding staff was 63 percent despite a sluggish domestic economy.
“You are going to go through cycles, like we are now in the U.S., France and a few other places that are in a little bit of a slowdown,” he said. “Those are slight pauses.”
He said the demographic issue, with rapid aging such as that in Japan, whose work force is forecast to shrink 16 percent by 2030, needed more focus.
The biggest shortfall for U.S. employers is a lack of engineers, followed by machinists and tradespeople.
In Asia and the Pacific, the most chronic issue is finding sales representatives, which Joerres attributed to increasingly complex requirements from multinationals expanding in Asia.
“The sales rep is no longer presenting just the vacuum cleaner at the door, if you will,” he said.
“It requires a different kind of skill and a more sophisticated sale, and I think Asia has a little ways to catch up on that compared to Western Europe and the Americas.”
