Monday, August 4, 2014

US job report: stable is the new growth - unless talent mismatch is fixed

Amongst the many reactions to the recent Jobs Report, including President Obama’s warning that unemployment will continue to go up and down and that we need to create more jobs faster… I spoke to the WSJ over the weekend about what I think is the answer to creating more jobs – right-skilling.

Fact is you could have pretty significant unemployment rates but does that mean you find the people you want with the skills you want? The answer is no. There is huge demand for niche skills like regulatory, risk, new technology… and so on, and until we address the skills gap, we will see limited job growth. So while we’ve added 200,000-plus jobs for six consecutive months which is a consistent, steady clip and I prefer this any day over sinusoidal ups and downs – clearly it’s not enough.

The good news is companies have begun investing heavily in right-skilling existing and potential talent to combat such issues and are seeing pockets of success. We just now need to do it on a much larger scale, targeting the right skill sets.