Businesses battle tight labor market
The U.S. Labor Department said this month that the number of job openings in the country rose 1.7 percent in July to 6.9 million, the most on record dating back to late 2000.
Meanwhile, the number of people quitting their jobs jumped 3 percent to 3.58 million, also a record high. Quits typically indicate that jobs are plentiful, because people usually quit when they have another job or are confident they can find one.
With the national unemployment rate at 3.9 percent, near an 18-year low, businesses are increasingly desperate to find skilled workers.
This is what an economy with full employment looks like.
The latest jobs numbers were not surprising and were of little comfort for most employers in Waukesha County, perhaps ground zero of the tight labor market. The county’s unemployment rate stood at a miniscule 2.9 percent in July.
Suzanne Kelley, president and chief executive officer of the Waukesha County Business Alliance, has been hearing from her members about their challenges in finding skilled workers for a few years now.
“In a survey the Alliance conducted in 2017, 67 percent of businesses in Waukesha County reported finding a skilled workforce to be the primary challenge they face when starting or growing their business,” Kelley said.
Partnering with Milwaukee church
Kelley said the Alliance has responded by creating “action teams” and “employer collaboratives” to explore solutions to the problem.
“We believe there are three tenets that make up a comprehensive workforce development strategy: developing our future workforce through partnerships with educational institutions, attracting new talent to our area, and retaining and skilling-up our existing workforce. The Alliance is investing more resources in these areas,” Kelley said.
One strategy has been partnering
with The Joseph Project in Milwaukee. The Alliance is connecting employers in Waukesha and New Berlin with the program, which provides training and transportation for unemployed Milwaukee citizens to jobs in other counties.
“To date, more than 50 people have been hired by our member companies through this program,” Kelley said. “It has been extremely well received, and we are working with Pastor Jerome Smith Sr. of Greater Praise Church of God in Christ to expand it to other parts of the county.”
Other proactive tactics being deployed by the Alliance to address the skilled labor crunch include:
Conducting “Schools2Skills” tours to make students, educators and parents aware of the open jobs waiting to be filled today and in the future.
Launching a “Careers Uncovered” program in which educators learn about career pathways in high-growth industries by spending a day at different businesses representing manufacturing, construction, health care and information technology.
Development of a “Workforce Readiness Dashboard” that will report on student preparedness measuring college skills, career skills and life skills within each school district in the county. The program will be launched in November.
“The tight labor market is making businesses think differently about the workforce,” Kelley said. “It’s driving greater collaboration, innovative thinking and increased investment in people and technology. From the Alliance’s perspective, these factors have been the key to progress and economic growth for the last 100 years and will continue to be so for the next 100 years.”
Earlier this month, the Alliance celebrated its 100th annual meeting.
A ‘double-digit’ list of open positions
Don Schlidt, president and chief executive officer of Dedicated Computing LLC, applauded Kelley and the Alliance for helping employers in the county share best practices for addressing the tight labor market.
“The talent shortage is growing, and despite the fact that companies are often competing with each other for talent,
I think the sharing of best practices and strategies among Waukesha-based companies has never been better,” Schlidt said.
Schlidt said his company has a “double digit” list of open positions it is trying to fill.
“We are certainly being creative in widening the talent funnel — yearround internships, university and technical college partnerships, re-framing jobs in a way to perhaps enable broader eligibility,” Schlidt said.
Widening the talent funnel might be the key to survival for many companies in the full employment economy.
Steve Jagler is the business editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. C-Level stands for high-ranking executives, typically those with “chief” in their titles. Send C-Level column ideas to him at steve.jagler@journalsentinel.com.