MILWAUKEE — Employers, workers and the educational system were each cited as contributors to Wisconsin’s so-called “skills gap” during a panel discussion Tuesday.
Mequon business owner Mary Isbister, one of the panelists, pointed to parents, schools and workers themselves for her long-standing difficulty in finding dedicated, enthusiastic manufacturing employees. But a representative of the staffing company ManpowerGroup admonished employers for “being way too picky,” having low wages, and for failing to solve barriers for workers, such as a lack of transportation and child care.
“I could have doubled my business last year if I could have found enough of the right people,” said Mary Isbister, president of GenMet metal fabricating in Mequon, during a panel discussion Tuesday on the so-called “skills gap” between unfilled jobs and unemployed workers.
“Would it be wonderful to have hundreds of people knocking at my door with experience in my industry? Absolutely. Would I hire them? In a heartbeat,” said Isbister. “But that’s isn’t reality. The reality is, the people who apply for the jobs that I have to offer might have a high school degree. If I’m really lucky, they’re in technical schools right now. Maybe they’ll pass a drug screen. And oftentimes, they will have come from another job and all they’re doing is filling out the application so they can get their unemployment benefits. That is the sorry state of affairs.”
But Melanie Holmes, vice president, World of Work Solutions for Milwaukee-based Manpower Group, said that in her firm’s experience, too many employers — not just in Wisconsin, but globally — are partly to blame if they can’t fill jobs.
“We’re finding, when we talk to employers — and I need to put myself on this list as a hiring manager — that we’re way too picky about who we’re hiring. We’re not willing to hire somebody who has most of what’s necessary and then invest in training to get them up and running,” said Holmes. “Wages have not been keeping up and in some cases, they’re going down. If we’re not paying enough, we’re not located where the workers are and we don’t have the support services like child care, no wonder we’re struggling to find the people we need to get the work done.”
Tuesday’s panel discussion was sponsored by the Milwaukee Press Club. Other panelists included Jonathan Barry, deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, and Mike Lovell, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee chancellor and former dean of the UWM College of Engineering & Applied Science.
Isbister insisted that all she asks is that employees demonstrate a solid work ethic and an aptitude to learn math and how to read a blueprint. She said GenMet will hire unskilled workers at $10 an hour plus benefits, and offer them on-the-job training in reading blueprints and other skills. Those who pass the training and show enthusiasm can increase their pay to $15 an hour within six months, she said.
“Why is it so hard?” lamented Isbister, who said the employee shortage has existed since she and her husband took over the company in 1999. She said she suspects that young people simply cannot envision a career in manufacturing because the jobs aren’t as familiar as nursing, retail sales or restaurant work. To make things worse, parents steer their offspring away from manufacturing jobs and toward college studies, she said.
Holmes agreed, and said companies need to overcome the perception that manufacturing jobs are prone to layoffs.
Barry suggested that more companies offer tours of their facilities to kids and their parents. In addition, families need to be exposed to educational options other than universities, he said, especially the option of technical schools.
“We can’t ‘sex up’ tech schools, per se, until you expand the horizons of young people so they can see, in fact, there is a career here for them,” he said.
UWM’s Lovell disagreed with the others that steering youths toward college is a problem, despite estimates that only 30 percent of job openings require a bachelor’s degree or higher.
“Only 1 in 4 Wisconsin residents have a four-year degree,” he said. “If 30 percent of the jobs out there require a four-year degree and we only have 25 percent of the population with four-year degrees, I’d say we don’t have enough.”
Lovell said UWM has successfully partnered with area employers such as Johnson Controls and GE Healthcare to tailor curriculum to specific skills sought by those employers. The university has also increased internships.
Lovell said that 88 percent of graduates last year were employed six months after graduation, three-fourths of them in the field they’d studied.
But he cautioned that math skills are key. Students who need to take remedial math upon enrolling at UWM have just a 14 percent chance of graduating within six years. And for those who fail remedial math, academic programs available to them drop from around 200 to 11.
Isbister said K-12 schools need to teach applied math — showing students exactly how geometry and other math skills are actually used on the job. “The problem comes from guidance counselors and parents who have no idea what jobs exist,” she said.
Barry said the Department of Workforce Development is moving forward with a new online system that will strive to better match job seekers with job openings by identifying the workers’ existing “skill clusters” instead of just matching specific keywords in their resumes to job descriptions.
The new labor market information database, which is scheduled to launch in spring of 2014, will hold job seekers accountable by possibly withholding unemployment benefits unless they comply by following through on job matches proposed by the system.
“There has to be a carrot-and-stick in this as well,” he said, noting that a few other states, including Utah, have decreased the length of unemployment benefits with similar systems.
But Barry said the carrot-and-stick approach will not apply to employers, who will not be required to follow through by interviewing and perhaps hiring the matched applicants.
Instead, he said, the system will help identify possible barriers to employment or areas of training needed by unemployed workers. “A person’s job while on UI, in our estimation, is to get a job and our job is to facilitate that process to a greater degree than we have in the past,” Barry said.
All panelists agreed that a “skills gap” exists and needs to be addressed.
“In addition to the anecdotal information that we gather from Manpower Group’s 400,000 clients around the world, and the 3 million people we put to work every year, we do research,” said Holmes. “Our 2012 talent shortage research tells us that in the United States, 49 percent of employers we surveyed are struggling to fill key positions. Forty-nine percent — let’s just call it half.”
The global average is 34 percent of employers; and in Japan, 81 percent of employers are struggling to fill jobs, she said.
— By Kay Nolan
For WisBusiness.com
Pictured, from left: Mary Isbister, president of GenMet Corp., Mequon; Jonathan Barry, deputy secretary, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development; Melanie Holmes, Vice president World of Work Solutions, Manpower Group; and Mike Lovell, chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
