systematicHR

Granted I’m playing up to all the sensationaliztic reports on talent and the U.S.’s inability to create an effective educational plan and environment to be competitive globally, I’m posting this commentary on workforce planning anyway. I was reading an article in the LA times that pointed to a school where the dropout rate of students was in the neighborhood of 50%.

So the concern over talent may not necessarily be 3-fold:

1. There are insufficient numbers of bodies to replace retirees.
2. There are insufficient numbers of currently mid-level talent to replace retiring senior level talent.
3. There is insufficient entering talent to replace existing retiring talent.

We’ve talked about workforce planning often enough, but we always focus on the exiting talent than the entering (non) talent. Certainly, there is sufficient debate not if there will be the talent to replace the retirees, but rather if they will be up to the job. Colin commented here that the U.S. workforce is not really going to shrink much if any at all. I also went out to the U.N. website and ran some queries and sure enough he’s right. So point number 1 above is really null and void.

Point numbers 2 and 3 seem to hold some water though. There truly is a dip in population in the mid career ranks compared to those in late career. Therefore, the very senior positions will have fewer candidates to fill them. That’s not to say there isn’t enough, but the talent resources desired will be more scarce.

The LA Times article seems to point to argument #3 as well. Other countries have long been catching up to us, and not only is the U.S. not keeping our own pace, we are effectively falling behind.

In the fall of 2004, 48,000 ninth-graders took beginning algebra; 44% flunked, nearly twice the failure rate as in English. Seventeen percent finished with Ds.

In all, the district that semester handed out Ds and Fs to 29,000 beginning algebra students — enough to fill eight high schools the size of Birmingham.

Among those who repeated the class in the spring, nearly three-quarters flunked again.Helfand, Duke, January 29, 2006. “A Formula for Failure in L.A. Schools,” Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com on January 30, 2006.

The tie-in to Outsourcing and Offshoring:
When one talks about a workforce crisis in the U.S., one must also talk about outsourcing and the diminishing of jobs. One of the main arguments for outsourcing is that the U.S. would retain higher quality jobs and outsource manual or administrative work. If you look at what’s going on in India, South Korea and China, that’s not the picture you get. Add 10 years and those 3 countries will look like the U.S. does today. (OK – give China 15 years). The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is not only losing jobs, it soon will not be producing the quality of talent that other nations have.

What the U.S. has in it’s favor is infrastructure and culture. We can out commercialize and apply capitalism better than anyone (except the Chinese – the communists seem to have learned well). But that only gets you so far. The coming war for talent is not one that we should be looking at on a domestic level – we should be wary of the global talent market in comparison.