Jobs available -- if you've got the hi-tech skills

One of the more puzzling conundrums of the tepid economic recovery is the so-called “skills mismatch” between employers and potential employees. Certain industries, including manufacturing, IT and health care, clamor for skilled workers and claim they can’t find them.

Others, though, don’t buy the sky-is-falling mantra of the manufacturers. If there’s such a paucity of skilled workers, they argue, then why isn’t there a commensurate rise in wages to lure them?

Business owners, welders, fabricators and finishers attending the FABTECH Expo, which ended Thursday at the Georgia World Congress Center, complained of the difficulty finding skilled technicians and engineers.

U.S. businesses listed 3.2 million job openings in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). A year earlier, they posted 2.4 million jobs. Filling three million positions would go a long way toward helping the nation’s 14.8 million unemployed workers.

Manufacturers, in particular, needed to fill 192,000 jobs in August, up from 134,000 a year earlier. Other industries, including government, education and business-services, needed more workers than manufacturers, according to BLS.

But the heightened attention on manufacturing underscores a core belief, echoed by FABTECH convention-goers, that the United States has a duty to make things and, if we don't, then more flexible, lower-paid foreigners will instead.

Other skilled-worker fears abound. Americans who lost jobs in construction, finance and retail may be fundamentally unsuited to fill skilled positions. The imminent retirement of tens of thousands of baby boomer technicians "is likely to have a greater impact on the manufacturing sector than on other sectors of the economy," the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College reported.

And many skilled workers, who could fill a job, say, in Georgia, may not be able to sell their house in Michigan and can’t relocate for the new position.

“The lack of skilled workers, over the next three years, will be the single biggest issue addressed by governments, chambers of commerce, manufacturers and educators,” said Mark Tomlinson, the executive director of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers who attended FABTECH. “It’s a fairly complex problem not only for large [companies], but for small- and medium-sized companies -- the heart and soul of the manufacturing space. If they can’t find somebody to load up these machines, they’re losing money.”

Cobb County’s Winslow said Win-Tech can’t “satisfy the delivery requirements for our current customers,” though he couldn’t say if his company was losing money due to too few employees.

Winslow laid off eight workers, who made between $15 and $32 an hour, during the recession. Most have been called back at the same wage rates. Winslow says he’d like to hire another four or five metal-workers to craft pieces for airplane wings and landing gear. But he can’t find them.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, suggests Winslow and other manufacturers pay higher wages to fill empty positions.

“We should be seeing rapidly rising wages in some sectors of the economy if employers are competing against each other for the few qualified workers out there,” Baker said. “And we’re not seeing that in any significant sector of the economy.”

Winslow and others blame today’s culture, partly, for the perceived skills mismatch. Kids, these days, are more likely to go to college than pick up a welding torch.

“Somewhere along the line over the last 20 years we taught our young people that working with your hands is beneath us,” said Ricky Minshew, who co-owns Welding Equipment and Supply Co. in Rome. “I’ve got two step-kids and they’re lazy. Welding is hot, hard work.”

Fewer students enrolled in welding, machining and other skilled classes prior to the recession at Georgia's technical schools, said spokesman Mike Light. Now, though, those classrooms are filled. And the Society of Manufacturing Engineers runs weeklong camps where kids learn the beauty of the skilled crafts.

“The lifeblood of the United States is our ability to innovate and create,” said the Society’s Tomlinson. “If you don’t make things, you don’t have an economy.”