Dirty Fingernails - A Badge Of Honor

We moan and carry on endlessly about the talent shortage in SCM. It's real, make no mistake.

But we seem to have a hard time looking at the full range of issues. That'll happen under stress to under-commit, over-deliver, and do it all with steadily diminishing resource pools.

Swept under the rug, the leadership shortfall is a looming crisis which won't be solved with more MBAs. We also have cascading demands for analytic skills, largely unfulfilled, and too often populated with under-experienced budding geniuses.

We do pay a lot of attention to the reality that few new entrants show up each year, while death and retirement eclipse the gains. And, vocational education and retraining initiatives tend to concentrate on pick-and-shovel workers who learn through OJT what it takes to pick and pack orders in distribution centers.

We, in SCM, tend to forget that we are in a death struggle, competing with manufacturing, and operations of all kinds, for a woefully inadequate workforce pool. Let's look at some frightening numbers that affect us all.

Given the workforce's average age and pace of retirement, we will need 10 million new skilled workers by 2020. Over half a million skilled jobs are going unfulfilled today. Over half of US employers are having trouble filling jobs.

Even CFOs are slowly figuring out that we need more workers, that there is not an inexhaustible supply of interchangeable parts to work in factories and DCs.

Societally, we have a dichotomy. Over 85% of Americans believe that workers, skilled workers, tradespeople are important to our national economic prosperity and standard of living. But only one in three of Americans would encourage children to pursue a trade - not just a job assembling Big Macs, but a well-paying trade. And, well over half of Americans claim lousy repair skills.

In the rising generation, the post-Millennials, over half have no interest whatsoever in manufacturing. Over 60% want a so-called "professional" career.

Meanwhile, the four-year university degree that costs $100,000 more than a technical school sees staggering unemployment rates among prestigious career graduates. At the same time, skilled trade employment growth is projected to much more than offset the idle educated numbers. Said another way, plumbers will be in huge demand and make good money, while architects will go begging, and find safe haven in their parent's basement rooms.

I have two questions for you. Are these factoids enough to keep you up at night? And, what are you doing about them?