Associated Builders and Contractors Heart of America endorse candidates who champion fair and open competition,…
The Hiring Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Talk to contractors right now, and you’ll hear the same frustration. Positions stay open. Good candidates are scarce. It’s tempting to chalk this up to some vague shift in the workforce, but a widely cited NBER analysis by Wharton economist Peter Cappelli dug into decades of employer data and found something more specific, and more useful, going on underneath the surface.
Here’s a question worth sitting with. Some of the jobs employers most often describe as hardest to fill, laborer, driver, general production roles don’t require highly specialized skill at all. So why are they hard to fill? The honest answer usually isn’t a lack of capable applicants. It’s a lack of anywhere for the job to lead. People will take a tough, lower-paying position and stick with it, if they can see a real path from there to something better. Take away that path, and the same job becomes a revolving door no matter how many people apply.
That lack of a path doesn’t come out of nowhere. It tracks closely with a decline in employer-provided training and career development more broadly. By 1991, only 17 percent of employees reported receiving any formal training at all that year. A 2011 Accenture survey of US employees found that just 21 percent had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years, meaning nearly 80 percent had gone half a decade without it. Registered apprenticeship, one of the most established forms of structured career development, followed the same trajectory: the number of apprentices dropped from around 500,000 to roughly 280,000 over that same span. Fewer than 50,000 people graduate from registered apprenticeship programs each year, a small number relative to a workforce of 160 million. None of this happened because the workforce stopped wanting to learn a trade. It happened because fewer employers, industry-wide, were building the pipelines, whatever form they take, to teach one.
That decline in training connects directly to how hiring itself has changed. Many of the difficulties employers report are tied to their own practices rather than a shortage of capable workers. In Manpower’s own surveys, roughly 20 percent of employers cited pay as a reason candidates weren’t accepting positions, yet only 5 percent said they planned to raise wages in response. At the same time, internal promotion has become far less common than it used to be. As fewer companies develop talent from within, they end up needing to hire externally for a much wider range of roles, not just entry-level positions but experienced, specialized ones too. One industry survey found that 72 percent of positions were filled from outside the company in 2007, and even after dipping during the recession, that number recovered to 58 percent by 2012. Meanwhile, hiring straight out of school accounted for only about 5.5 percent of new hires at these same companies. Put simply, employers are now hiring externally for jobs that used to be filled by promoting someone already on the team, and that shift alone makes hiring feel a lot harder, even when there’s no actual shortfall in the number of qualified people out there.
That’s exactly the gap real career advancement pathways close, whether that takes the shape of apprenticeship, structured craft training, upskilling programs, or some combination built around a company’s own needs. What matters is the destination, not the specific label on the program. A laborer who can see a clear route toward becoming a journeyman, and eventually a foreman, has a reason to stay and grow rather than move on at the first better-paying offer somewhere else. Investing in that kind of development rebuilds the internal advancement pipeline that’s eroded industry-wide, and it does it while producing exactly the kind of trained, experienced workers who are ready to contribute on day one.
This is also the thinking behind one of the largest workforce investments the industry has seen recently. ABC’s partnership with Meta to launch America’s Workforce Academy is industry led career development in action: training people directly into real, lasting careers rather than competing for an already thin pool of experienced hires. You can read the full story here: Meta, ABC Form Partnership to Launch Academy to Train and Create Jobs for Construction Craft Professionals. Registered apprenticeship, craft training, upskilling, and other structured career pathways are all proven, available tools right now, and any of them, built around exactly the advancement path that turns a hard-to-fill job into a career worth staying for.
Related Posts
