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When Ira Wolfe asked local business leaders Tuesday how many of them have had difficulty filling a key position, about half of them raised their hands.
Exactly, Wolfe said, and it's going to get worse.
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Call centers are symbols of India's economic boom. With Anglicized names and feigned Western accents, Indians handle credit card problems and troubleshoot computers, collect debts and conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Over the past decade or so, relatively high salaries in the call center sector have attracted thousands of applicants across the country. But now the boom is going bust because India's college graduates and young job seekers just don't want to be bothered with the business anymore.
Young people say it is no longer worthwhile going through sleepless nights serving customers halfway around the world. They have better job opportunities in other fields.
More about worker shortages in India and The Perfect Labor Storm
In the next three or four years, there's expected to be a 30 to 40 percent shortage of technical and professional oil workers in the United States, according to Damon Beyer of Katzenbach Partners, a Houston-based management consultancy that specializes in the energy sector.
Over a quarter of the industry's highly skilled employees - petroleum engineers, process engineers, geologists, geophysicists and the like - are eligible for retirement in two years, said Beyer.
"It's a real issue," said Beyer. "Success in attracting new people into the work force is limited."
Worldwide, the industry's "people deficit" is expected to reach up to 15 percent by 2010, according to Pritesh Patel, an associate director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Continue reading about oil worker shortages and The Perfect Labor Storm 2.0
"Workforce issues are the number one economic development issue in Oklahomaquot; says Terry Watson, with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. "And it is an issue for which there is no single solution."
One recent survey reported that 39 percent of Oklahoma employers who wanted to expand but were unable to do so because they could not find the workers the companies needed, Watson said.
Studies conducted by the department, as well as other research, indicates state employers will need more workers than Oklahoma's population growth is expected to produce.
"The state that solves this problem first is probably going to win," Watson said.
The Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 is fast approaching!
The nation's largest oil products pipeline system faces the impending retirement of a quarter of its workforce and competition from other industries for new employees as it prepares a large expansion of operations, its chief executive told a US Senate committee on Nov. 6.
Oil and gas industry consolidation sharply reduced employment by more than 500,000 jobs from 1982 through 2000, Colonial Pipeline Co. President and CEO Norm Szydlowski told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee during a hearing on energy industry employment.
"While Colonial's employment remained relatively stable during those years, we have had to deal with the same shrinking pool of candidates applying for careers within the overall industry. We are competing hard for candidates who may have fewer skills than candidates 10 years ago," he said in his written testimony.
Industry-wide, the petroleum sector estimates 27% of its workforce is within 5 years of retirement. That figure is the same for Colonial's workforce. The problem is worse among the people who operate the pipeline, where nearly one in five employees is eligible to retire within 2 years," Szydlowski said.
Read more about skilled worker shortages and visit the Perfect Labor Storm website.
