At Covalent, our job is helping high-stakes industrial businesses have the right people with the right skills working on the right job at the right time. So while our partners currently face countless challenges (e.g., end-market demand, supply chain resilience, etc.), we look through a lens toward the workforce — whether they be on-the-floor, in-the-field, on-the-deck-plate, etc.

With that in mind, we are seeing the majority of industrial businesses currently falling into one of two groups:

• Operations have been idle, and leadership is “reopening”. It’s unclear how quickly work will ramp back up, who will be needed, who will return to work, and what skills they will bring with them. …

Thanks to the “skills gap”, as well as the dynamism of high-stakes manufacturing, an increasing number of employers are taking on more responsibility for training in-house and effectively “growing their own”. While this means more classroom instruction and e-learning videos, it also means more on-the-job training (OJT). Let’s unpack the challenges of running an effective program:

#1 Managing OJT is hard. When we say OJT, we are thinking of all the informal learning that happens on-the-floor and in-the-field — often between an experienced worker and inexperienced worker. In the case of a new hire, this individual is usually onboarded and given mandatory training on safety, quality, ethics, and sexual harassment in the first few days. After that, OJT begins. …

The workforce development ecosystem is a collection of institutions that are constantly trying to match the supply and demand of skills in a city / region / industry / country. This includes educational institutions (e.g., high schools and community colleges), employers, workforce boards, governments (i.e., local, state, and federal), unions, and trade associations. In this blog, we’re going to focus on the particular importance of employers because they: 1) are solely responsible for defining which jobs and skills are actually in-demand at any one point in time and 2) survive based on their ability to buy (hire) or build (train) those skills. …

Over the past decade in particular, there have been countless research publications, news articles, and TV segments discussing a macro-trend called the “skills gap” or the “middle-skills gap”. For our purposes here, we felt it was necessary to share how we define the skills gap and why it is such a crucial problem for our economy. Setting a baseline will help us all engage on some of the more actionable best practices to combat it.

The skills gap is the mismatch between the in-demand jobs that employers need to fill and the jobs that job-seekers are qualified to perform. According to the Manufacturing Institute, there will be a shortfall of ~2.4 million qualified workers between 2018 and 2028. Said differently, ~2.4 million jobs will go unfilled, which will fundamentally hamper employers’ abilities to deliver on customer contracts, win new business, and remain economically competitive. …

Over the past decade in particular, there have been countless research publications, news articles, and TV segments discussing a macro-trend called the “skills gap” or the “middle-skills gap”. For our purposes here, we felt it was necessary to share how we define the skills gap and why it is such a crucial problem for our economy. Setting a baseline will help us all engage on some of the more actionable best practices to combat it.

The skills gap is the mismatch between the in-demand jobs that employers need to fill and the jobs that job-seekers are qualified to perform. According to the Manufacturing Institute, there will be a shortfall of ~2.4 million qualified workers between 2018 and 2028. Said differently, ~2.4 million jobs will go unfilled, which will fundamentally hamper employers’ abilities to deliver on customer contracts, win new business, and remain economically competitive. …

As we introduced in our series opener, “Understanding the Local ‘Skills Gap’”, many employers — such as healthcare providers and manufacturers — face a growing shortage of skilled talent. To be more specific, and for the purposes of this series, we are focusing on what are called “middle skill” jobs, which typically require more than a high school degree but less than a four-year college degree. These positions also often require an Associate’s degree, professional license, certification, or other form of post-secondary education. To get a quick sense of scale, so-called “frontline healthcare workers”, who require less than a four-year college degree by definition, represent ~50% of the entire healthcare workforce across all delivery settings, according to CareerSTAT. …