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by SixSigma 3910 days ago
And the home secretary is going to say today that immigration is bad for the economy !

In my sector, Supply Chain Management, we are facing a skills shortage.

* Warehouse operatives are moving from many low skilled pickers to a few skilled robot sitters and the latter are in short supply.

* Procurement - moving from the soft skills of buying person to person over the phone to electronic exchange and online bidding - again a skills shortage is looming for the non-managerial staff.

* Driving - HGV is facing a short supply as the retiring workfoce is not being replaced by young people and more demand for last mile drivers for the shift to single package delivery.

* Supply chain managers - a relatively new title and one that few young people consider. The Novus Trust in the UK is promoting the career path in a hope to encourage new entrants.

3 comments

One observation is they're just not paying enough. Oddly enough, if you're willing to drop $150K there is no shortage of software developers worldwide. People can dehydrate themselves crying in their beer over there being no truck drivers at $20K/yr, but once they offer more than $30K/yr, people will start to line up. For the last couple generations this has been a dog whistle for immigration or H1B style indentured slavery; "We can't find anyone (for $7.25/hr) so we'll have to import".

Another observation is some of your jobs are extremely temporary, like becoming a cable TV installation technician, once the metropolis is wired up in the mid 80s, 99.999% of them are permanently unemployed. So you're going to have to offer fat stacks of cash to drive a truck until permanently replaced by an automated truck in a couple years or have this years flavor of the month of robot certified system engineer cert holders or whatever, because in five or ten years they'll be permanently unemployable or at absolute best case be unemployed and retraining. You can't expect to pay people a low career level wage for an extremely short term job.

A final observation is for real long term careers you've listed, when business people say there's a skill shortage, they rarely mean a shortage of people with skills, because the skills are often pretty widespread and trivial, but a shortage of business people and HR personnel who can CYA on hiring decisions via authority like diplomas and govt licenses, or an established hierarchy like "top 100 biz/med/legal school lists". None of those skills listed are weird or rare in your average human population; you're not asking for research grade theoretical physicists; every house that has a roll of toilet paper in the toilet paper holder has some human who at least vaguely understood logistics; you only need to hire the top 0.001% of that enormous proven skilled population. Its just if you make a mistake in the hiring process you can't act all blameless because he had a MBA from Harvard so I'm not responsible for hiring the wrong guy, or he had a license from the state bureau claiming he was qualified, or he held journeyman papers. Or in summary, its a management CYA behavior problem not a real workforce skill problem.

You can't just up wage offers and see results. HGV driving already pays good wages here - upwards of $750 p/w and it costs something like $1500 to get qualified.

Even if you only work for a year, you will recoup your investment so I don't think it can possibly be people thinking that "I'm not going to be an HGV driver because robots will take my job, I shall stay here in McDonald's on minimum wage"

So it can't be a purely wage issue that keeps millions of people in low pay / unemployment and not behind an HGV steering wheel.

Could be that the McDonalds employee doesn't have the $1,500 to get qualified. For a great many people, that's an amount that seems impossible to save.
If industry was really desperate they would simply offer people training contracts with a buy out clause. I.e. the company pays for the training and the driver (assuming they pass) then has to work for the company for a minimum length of time or buy themselves out. This would surely be a win-win for everyone.
Ah the old story Industry doesn't want to pay for training
Industry is willing to pay but individual companies are not, especially in the days of "job for 5 years".

For instance The NOVUS Trust [1] is a Supply Chain / Logistics undergraduate scheme that guarantees a job for those graduating with a 2:1 or over that is sponsored by industry members.

[1] http://www.novus.uk.com/

I don't see industry calling for the introduction of training Levys or to stop uskilled Mc Jobs being promoted as apprenticeships to avoid paying the minimum wage.
"Industry" is quite a wide generalisation.
Interestingly, there is pressure on both sides there - greater automation means that new skills are needed for the few jobs left, but the fact you're talking about training a handful, rather than training at scale makes for more expensive training per head.
Well Amazon still has a large number of bodies I live near the UK's big warehouse and overheard some interesting gossip about that.

Basically the rumor is that Amazon might have similar problems to Ford did in the UK where Junior supervisors are playing favorites