How Big A Shortage?

    Dec. 21, 2004

    By 2010, just seven years from now, the shortage of workers is projected to be a stunning 10.03 million throughout the U.S. economy, figures the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Maybe. The truth is that nobody knows exactly how big the worker shortage will be. "The estimates the BLS has are the best estimates we have. [But] that doesn't mean they are accurate," states Carl Van Horn, a professor and director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. "Fundamentally, it depends upon GDP growth," he says. Indeed, depending on how fast the U.S. economy grows between now and the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the shortage of skilled workers could be 6.5 million people, 8 million or even 12 million, he suggests. Economists generally figure U.S. GDP growth this year will be a below-par 2.5%. Nevertheless, it's possible for BLS to get GDP growth projections right, as it did in the late-1980s, and not anticipate some major structural changes in the labor market. "I don't remember anybody [who] predicted the dot-com revolution, nor did they predict the dot-com bust. And yet there were millions of jobs involved both on the upside and the down side," says Van Horn. Although the numbers may be less than precise, the BLS projections of a skilled workers shortage are in "the right direction," believes Van Horn. "For the next five years or so, there are going to be these skill shortages."

    About the Author

    John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

     John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
          
          McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
          
          His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
          
          John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
          
          John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
          
          John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
          

     

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