The talent shortage remains a constant concern across all industry sectors, as Wisconsin’s unemployment rate reached record lows last year and currently sits at 3 percent. But that has not slowed employers’ hiring plans for the first quarter.
According to Milwaukee-based ManpowerGroup’s Q1 2019 Employment Outlook Survey, 28 percent of the state’s employers intend to hire more workers from January through March. That is a 3 percent increase over the first quarter of 2018, and a 4 percent increase over last quarter.
A low unemployment rate and the increasing demand for skilled workers are not new trends for the state’s economy. However, the job market in 2019 is paved by some underlying themes that differentiate it from years past, said Michael Stull, senior vice president of Manpower North America. Stull will be a panelist at BizTimes Media’s 2019 Economic Trends breakfast on Jan. 25 at the Italian Conference Center in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward.
One of those differences is a low labor force participation rate, or the percentage of people actually working. The national participation rate currently sits at about 63 percent, Stull said, while it usually hovers around 67 or 68 percent.
Considering the 3.9 percent national unemployment rate only accounts for people actively looking for a job, there are “a lot of people on the sidelines,” Stull said.
“The job market that we have today isn’t really functioning in a way that adapts or adopts very quickly, and that’s where you start seeing this low participation rate, because people don’t have the skills and they don’t have the opportunity to get the skills,” he said.
Today’s employers are also faced with global competition, and as a result, tend to consume labor rather than investing in and developing the current workforce, Stull said.
In order to bridge this gap, talent recruitment needs to focus more on skills and less on experience, he said.
“For example, somebody that is a shipping clerk typically has great problem-solving skills, and those problem-solving skills can be very powerful in a lot of different jobs,” Stull said. “So, if you can take somebody that has good problem-solving skills and turn them into other roles, that’s really important.”
Soft skills, such as problem-solving or communication, are more in demand than ever before as technology advances and repetitive tasks are replaced by AI and robotics, he said.
Stull upholds “employability and learnability” as the two most important soft skills employees should possess during this time of digital transformation.
“Every employer should be really working hard at finding those people, attracting those people and keeping those people because when they have them, they can build them into the type of workers they need,” he said
Employers also need to think more about the desired outcome of building talent instead of focusing on the often costly investment in the process, he said.
From a broader perspective, building a skilled workforce will allow Wisconsin’s economy to continue to compete on a global scale – even amidst economic slowdown.
However, in a state with a shrinking talent pool, building skills may mean bringing more people into the workforce. Stull said companies should look to populations such as senior citizens, veterans and the disabled for potential talent.
Out-of-state recruitment efforts will continue to be a strategy to address Wisconsin’s talent shortage, but becoming a place of choice doesn’t happen overnight, Stull said. Cities such as Portland and Austin followed long-term plans to build the brands that have attracted their current workforce.
“We all have to get aligned behind the community that we want to be in, that we think will be attractive not only to the people that are here, but to the people who want to come. And we need to make sure we align all of our institutions and all of our messaging behind that,” Stull said.
