Steady hiring pace expected, Manpower finds

Wisconsin, nation outlooks unchanged

Both Wisconsin and the nation can expect an overall steady pace of job creation in the upcoming July-September quarter, according to the latest quarterly survey of employer confidence by ManpowerGroup Inc.

Milwaukee-based Manpower, which also breaks out the data in its Quarterly Employment Outlook Survey by major metropolitan areas, anticipates a slight slowdown in the fourcounty metro region that includes Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties.

What the Manpower index doesn’t show, however, is that the traditional workforce is shifting in radical ways that aren’t reflected in the data, particularly among manufacturers, who often want to hire a new breed of automation engineers but too often can’t find people with the skills, said Chris Layden, head of Manpower’s Experis division, which recruits high-end engineering and technical workers.

“Take a simple systems engineer today at a large manufacturer, and in one year that same engineer will need to interact with systems that can compute with artificial intelligence,” Layden said.

Job reports have moved front-and-center in Wisconsin in recent weeks, after the state last year posted its weakest job creation performance since the 2007-’09 recession. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump will visit Waukesha County Technical College to make the case to expand the use of apprenticeships to fill unmet labor needs.

In the upcoming quarter, according to Manpower, just over one in four employers polled in Wisconsin plans to increase staffing. Another 4% expect to reduce staff, while 68% will leave headcounts unchanged and 2% didn’t know, resulting in what the survey calls a “net employment outlook” of 22%. The index is unchanged from the previous quarter and little changed from 23% in the same quarter a year ago.

The projections were similar for national results, which showed a net employment outlook of 17%, unchanged from the previous quarter and in the same range of 15%-18% since the final quarter of 2014.

Manpower makes seasonal adjustments for its national outlook data, which smooth out annually occurring fluctuations due to weather or school holidays, but not for state and local data.

Nationally and in the state, manufacturing employers are in hiring mode, Manpower’s survey found found.

However, the latest Manpower report comes at a time of

tumultuous change within the manufacturing sector in both Wisconsin and nationally, analysts concur.

Manufacturing output in Wisconsin shifted into reverse and declined in 2015 and 2016. Manufacturing employment last year posted declines in 28 states, including a steep drop in Wisconsin.

At the same time, a chorus of Wisconsin employers say they can’t hire enough high-skill workers even as aging workers with time-honored skills retire. Recent reports show that wages are falling for conventional production work but rising for high-end engineers and designers, even as the pre-automation-era middle class jobs of the last century vanish.

“Technological disruption is rapidly changing skills needs, especially in manufacturing, as the marketplace transitions from typical labor to more advanced roles,” said Manpower executive Michael Stull.

The current raft of job indicators have begun to send contradictory signals.

“There is more mixed information than I’d typically expect,” said Dale Knapp, head of research at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a research group in Madison.

Milwaukee-based Manpower is one of the world’s largest staffing and recruitment firms, operating in 80 nations. Its quarterly indicator provides a forward-looking barometer on hiring that is unavailable from government data, which only looks backward at each month’s developments.

For 55 years, the survey has derived all of its information from a single question: “How do you anticipate total employment at your location to change in the coming three months? Will employment increase, decrease or stay the same?”

As such, the quarterly outlook is a useful leading indicator of overall direction but comes with significant limitations. The index reveals little about the actual number of new jobs, what they pay, whether they are full-time and whether they include benefits. Nor did the Manpower survey for Wisconsin last year predict that the pace of hiring in the state would slow dramatically.

“We are not asking if they are hiring 10 people or 100 people or 1,000 people,” Layden said.