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U.S. Employers Say They Can’t Find Skilled Workers
Should they be training their own? And why did they stop in the first place?
For several years now, the U.S. job market has been booming. And for even longer, companies have had the same complaint: They can’t find enough skilled workers. Businesses across a wide swath of industries, particularly trucking, restaurants, health care, and tech, report problems finding people with enough know-how to do the work.
This policy area has been a focus of the administration for years now. In 2018, the president signed an executive order, tasking a new “Council for the American Worker” with improving the federal government’s patchwork of job training programs and expanding apprenticeship and midcareer training programs. Yet, despite the administration’s attention, employers continue to struggle. A recent survey from the National Federation of Independent Businesses found that 35% of small business owners had job openings they were unable to fill in August, and 89% of those hiring reported having “few or no qualified applicants” for their open positions. More than a quarter of small business owners surveyed said finding qualified workers was their most important business problem.
This raises an interesting question: Why are so few businesses providing the job training required to create the skilled workers they need? While the data on employer-provided training is, in the words of one researcher, “terrible,” the existing evidence suggests companies have backed off the kind of training many provided in earlier eras. A paper published in 2015 by C. Jeffrey Waddoups, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found a 28% decline in the number of workers who got training from their employers between 2001 and 2009. Those numbers were down across most industries, occupations, and demographic groups.
Two other major changes in the U.S. economy are likely also to blame here: the decimation of American unions and the “fissuring” of the American workforce.
As Robert Lerman, a fellow at the Urban Institute and an expert on apprenticeship and workforce training, laid out in a paper for the…
