Navigating the Future of Work: Addressing America's Skills Gap and Employment Challenges with Ed Gordon

Yes. Here's the book.

Future Jobs, Solving the Employment and Skills Crisis. It was my 19th book on this topic. Won a National Book Award from the Independent Publishers Association. And it's available. on Amazon, and you can order it all over the place. And it summarizes what you're going to hear today, as well as a white paper that we published after COVID called Job Shock, because the COVID crisis made the whole employment and skills deficits even worse than it was before.

this is on our website, imperialcorp. com. You can get this free on our website, imperialcorp. com. Okay.

Future Jobs was published originally in 2013, and then I updated it in 2018.

Approximately, you're right, yes. Yes, I wrote a book called The 2010 Meltdown even earlier talking about the huge retirement of 73 million boomers that started in 2010. Now, this year,2024, more boomers are set to retire than ever before. And the workforce is growing at a rate now of 0.2% per year. And that is now projected to continue to at least 2032. So you have a very small number of younger people entering the workforce on one end, and you have 73 million people who have retired between 2010 and 2030 on the other end. And about a third of those boomers were what I call skilled, meaning they were lawyers or they were plumbers. They were brain surgeons or they worked in advanced manufacturing or they could build a Boeing airplane, about a third of them. So now the employers are struggling to replace those third of the baby boomers. Now, just today, this came out and this is the JOLTS report that the Department of Labor issues periodically.

Officially, we have around 9 million vacant jobs. I suspect that that's an undercount by several million.

Now, one of the Federal Reserve governors suggested that in order to get interest rates down, that employers just stop reporting all these vacant jobs, and then the Fed will lower interest rates. Well, there's a problem I have with that. Now, the Fed feels that if employment is robust, it means the economy is expanding, businesses are borrowing more money, and it's going to cause more inflation. All right. My problem is that two-thirds of the jobs that companies are hiring right now are replacing people who have retired. All right. Particularly smaller companies. The National Federation of Independent Businesses reports an all-time high number of companies that can't find skilled people. All right. So is this a problem? Yes, it's a problem. Is it going to go away? No. And the way many of you have filled those jobs is by poaching from other people in your industry or trying to import workers from other parts of the U.S. or from overseas.

Well, the problem is this is a global talent shortage, and it's true all over the U.S. now. So those strategies are bankrupt, basically. There's no one left to poach. In other words, the skilled worker critical mass across America is now insufficient to support this fourth industrial revolution that we're going through, where machines, equipment, technologies, and jobs are just becoming more complicated. And according to Georgetown, the Center for Employment and Training, By 2031,75% of all the jobs will require a 12th grade reading level of comprehension and math and a post-secondary component, a certificate, two-year degree, apprenticeship, or four-year degree or more. And right now, about a third of the young people coming out of high school qualify for that number. That was true when I graduated from high school. And that's 1970. And then we had a lot of low-skill jobs that paid what you'll call a blue-collar middle-class level of wage.

All right. And this isn't 1970 anymore, folks. Those days are over. And this is not a Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, deep state. Chinese, Russian conspiracy, forget all the conspiracy theories you want. And raising tariffs, putting a wall around the U.S. and keeping all the immigrants out, fleeing from international business, NATO, all alliances, that's not going to solve this problem. This is a systemic collapse of the education to employment ability of communities. to just basically produce enough educated people to fill your jobs. We aren't doing it. We're just not doing it. And it's critical now it's going to get worse, a lot worse.

Correct.

Correct, correct. Okay, let's, I want to tell you a story. Yeah. That illustrates this problem. Now, this was an article that appeared recently in the business section in the New York Times. It's about how electric vehicles are killing or creating jobs. Now, this is in Detroit. And Ford has said now they're going to go and convert a factory from making regular gasoline cars to electric vehicles. Well, the workers are upset because it's going to kill jobs and they don't want them to do it. Now, in Detroit and another location is another Ford plant that closed a long time ago. And across the street is a technical college. And in the technical college, they have a program where they're taking auto workers and training them to build electrical vehicles. And there's a grant. from the state. I don't know if Ford is supporting this or whatever. So that if you sign up, the tuition is basically free. All right.

And there are a lot of jobs right now they're trying to fill. Okay. So the question is, why aren't more for question number one, why aren't more of the Ford workers signed up in these programs to build electrical vehicles? All right, that's number one. Number two is Ford Motor Company encouraging them by giving them some time off and even subsidizing that process so they have their workers, okay? A third question, are the Detroit public schools educating enough kids to come out of high school so they have the basic reading and writing and math? And when you mean basic, I mean they can comprehend. instruction manuals and computers and do the math. And now that's at the 12th grade level. Are they doing that? All right. All right. Now let's just set that aside. Let's go back to 1890s or early 1900. Henry Ford was going to build the first cars. Oh my God, the blacksmiths were outraged.

All those horses were going to be gone and they were going to be out of work. Well, now I have a question. How many of those blacksmiths ultimately went and learned how to make a Model T and work in a Ford plant? Well, some of them did, obviously. And that was a big transition from the farm and into the city. from the farm into the factory or offices, all right? And we made that transition 100 years ago. In fact, we created, we were the first nation in the history of civilization to create a public school system where everybody got some education, at least enough to work in a factory or an office. And then in the 1920s, we actually went a step further and sent women to high school. Are you nuts? Women shouldn't go to high school. You're going to give them ideas, but we did that. And my mother, in the 1920s in Chicago, is one among the first women to get a four-year high school education. All right, well, thank God we did that.

When World War II came along, Rosie the Riveter, how many planes and ships and guns did they build? Of course, then they lost all those jobs. But we did pass the GI Bill, and many men came back. and went and got technical education as well as degrees. And they became the skilled workers. And the middle class grew. And we've done more. And we did a great job. So by 1970, we had the best educated workforce in the world. Really, we did. And then Bill Gates screwed it up because he had to introduce those damn PCs all over the place. Remember a long time ago, before many of your audience was alive, we had computer centers where the big blue IBM boxes were sitting on elevated floors in air-conditioned centers, and that's where the computers were and the weird people working on the computers. Then we moved and we started putting those PCs everywhere in offices and factories, etc., and that really screwed things up. So what happened?

Well, for a while, I have news for you. Companies started training workers in order to use that equipment. And from the 1980 to the mid-1990s, they set up corporate training and development. Some of them set up corporate universities. And actually, there were several books written all about the learning organization and investing in human capital. Oh, my God, this is incredible. And then around the mid-90s, someone said, hey, we can put some software together on a disk. They've had disks then. And we can eliminate all those training programs. And we'll just give you this software. You can go home and learn how to be a salesman. Or you can learn anything you want all by yourself. And we don't have to have a training center anymore. So training started to retreat. I know because I owned and operated Imperial Corporate Training and Development, and it just gradually shrank down and down and down and down.

And now we have maybe 20,25% of companies still train workers and the rest don't. We empower you. You go out and get the education and come to me and you can work for me. Otherwise, I'm not interested. So. Why was it in the 20th century that we developed this? Well, there was a demand for it, and it was popular. Remember the space race? Who was going to get to the moon first? Well, when I was in grammar school and high school, they forced all that science and math. down my throat, okay? But we landed on the moon, didn't we, in 69? And we had the National Defense Act that pushed more money into schools to train more kids in math and science. Well, that all ended. That was no longer a priority. We landed on the moon, so that's over. Okay. Well, right now, who are the teachers? Who are the teachers that I had that were mainly women? And many of them were very bright. They necessarily didn't have a degree in education.

but they were bright and I got a pretty good education from those women and men too. Well, then we, hey, we started allowing women to go into and become CPAs and doctors and attorneys and all these professional areas. And we esteem those jobs. What about teaching? Well, you know. And now, hey, I'm a helicopter parent. My kid is bright. You know that? And he only gets A's or she only gets A's. So who goes into teaching? Well, people who can't make it into business. You know that. You know, when Ed Gordon gets up in front of a business group, I say I'm president of Imperial Consulting Corporation in Chicago. I don't talk about the 20 years I spent in higher ed in business, psychology, history, teaching. Because numbskulls are teachers. They're not. Now, business people, that's different. Our business schools, I did teach some business stuff. So when you say businesses aren't training, right, short term.

but we don't encourage more people to go into education as a career either because it doesn't pay very well. And we don't really esteem educators, maybe business people or professors in law schools. But other than them, we really don't encourage that too much. And if I'm a parent, my kid only deserves an A and I don't want any homework for that kid. And anyway, now with chat GDP. You don't have to learn to write. You don't have to learn to read. And with the internet, Google, et cetera, all the facts are right there. You know, look at the two of us, the talking heads. You know, all you got to do is go on and find a webinar. They'll tell you everything you need to know. You don't need to read a book, newspaper, magazine. No. And you can rely on the internet or social media and television for all your news. So why aren't we doing more about skilled workforce? Well, society is not interested. We've moved beyond that.

Hey, I was at a World Future Conference a few years ago where they said that soon you could get a bachelor's degree and you could be totally illiterate because all you needed to do was look at pictures. Yeah. Isn't that wonderful? Well, you tell your employers that. Is that the kind of person they want to hire? To repair an engine or build a ship or a plane? I don't think so.

Right.

Right.

Oh, I do too. It's over 12 million.

Well, some of them have skills, but they need additional specific job training to do what you want them to do. Okay. And they have applied and applied and applied. And again, most companies won't train them. So they have become very, very angry. And they've taken other jobs, many of them part-time jobs, lower-paying jobs. And they're angry about this because they are now losing their middle-class economic status and are being forced down into a lower economic situation. And they blame, and they're looking for, What's what is doing this?

That's right. So if you're on the far left, you look at that and they say tax the rich and redistribute the income or free college tuition. You know, many people start college and drop out because in the end they find out they don't have the skills. to get through college courses. It's not a question that they're stupid. It's a question that their elementary and secondary education was insufficient. And they don't realize that until maybe they're 22 or 23 years old. And then they see how all those years were wasted because either they had poor teaching or they didn't apply themselves or their parents really didn't emphasize education. that that was necessary. They spent too much time on sport activities or other activities. So they're angry. Now, on the other end, people say, well, the immigrants are taking away our jobs. Well, in all reality, we can't import enough skilled immigrants to cover all these jobs. All right.

And now every country is actually looking for skilled immigrants. And many of those countries, their populations are shrinking, literally, not just the workforce, but the overall population. Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, all those countries have shrinking populations. All right. So, or America first, let's put tariff walls around the U.S. And we won't allow any, we'll build up our local industries. All right. We can do that. And cut off all immigrants. You can do that. That will cause tremendous inflation. And we don't have the, we still don't have the skilled workers to, I'll give you an example. For years, Imperial Corporate Training and Development, which was our training company that I ran. We had a large commuter railroad in Chicago that is still there and growing and moves hundreds of thousands of people around.

They could not get electricians, conductors, maintenance of way, drivers or electrical people. So they had us run what we called workforce education programs. The majority of the people in those were recent immigrants to the U.S. who needed English as a second language, and they needed reading, math, writing skills. Fifteen trade unions ran apprenticeship programs for the railroad, but you needed at least a ninth grade reading level to be in a classroom and function as a learner. We helped hundreds of those workers. to get into those apprenticeship programs because this railroad could not hire people. They were good wages, some of the highest wages in the railroad industry. They couldn't find the electricians and others. And they're still doing that. We don't run that program anymore. They're still running those programs. They're investing in workers. Why are they investing in workers? Well, if they don't, they don't have a railroad.

So why does Boeing invest? huge amounts of money in training programs. Well, they need skilled technicians to put together those Boeing 737 airplanes, okay? That's why they run the programs. Well, they are having problems like every other manufacturer finding individuals who have the necessary educational abilities to learn, to learn how to learn. Okay, so, and this is true, overall manufacturing will be short a million workers within a few years, high-end manufacturing, and they're high-end. And so is Airbus. Airbus is the same problem. And now they have quality problems. You read about it in the news. I remember all the quality training that Imperial used to do in manufacturing. and quality circles and team building and ISO 9000, all of these, that's all gone. You don't hear about quality. So the irony is this. Companies are not training to save money. And short term, they're buying back their stock. They're relying more on technology.

They're lowering quality. Predictivity looks like it's up, but it really isn't. Long term, all they're doing is they're draining the workforce out of skilled people. That's really what's going on.

And this fourth industrial revolution, we could go back to, hey, why don't we go back to 1970? Let's take all these. all this computer stuff and throw it away. Well, then you'll have plenty of low-skilled jobs. Well, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen in a million years. But when employers think they can take technology and that alone will run their business. I remember when AT &T, the Bell Operating Companies, were wiped out. And it was just going to be AT &T. And George Allen was the new president. And the joke was AT &T stood for George Allen and two temps. Well, that's, you know, but now what the companies are finding is that, yeah, I maybe need fewer workers to make this widget, but they have to be able to run these computers and they have to be able to do all these other things as well. All right. And I can't find the people that can do that.

So it's the educators, it's their fault because I don't have time and money to do the training. They're sending me people who can't read and write. Right.

Well, no one's training them how to think.

They don't know there are questions. They rely on others.

Okay, now. What the hell's the matter with this? Okay, let's now talk about solutions. Yes, okay, good idea. Because I'm into solutions. The first half of this book is the problem. The second half of the book are... Who's doing something about it? All right, I was just talking today to a good friend of mine. His name is Jack Oaks. Jack Oaks was in adult education in Santa Ana, California for his whole career, all right? Santa Ana is near Disneyland, near Anaheim, and is... a large concentration of small manufacturing. And that started to implode in the late 1990s as the Anglo population was moving out and the Hispanic population was moving in and the manufacturers could not find workers. So they created Bridge to Careers. This was a program with the Chamber of Commerce. the local business people, and the school system. They contacted me because I'd written a book. And you know what it was called?

Skill Wars, Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit. And so I worked with them on this bridge to careers. And then it moved into, they created something they called High School Inc. And it was one of their high schools, and they created six career programs. So this became a career academy high school. So it was a marriage of the liberal arts plus six business sectors that dominate Santa Ana, California. And they created the High School, Inc. Foundation. So now they have 50,100 businesses. giving money to the foundation to support these six career academies in this public high school. This is a public high school, and it's become very successful. Now they are working to integrate this into the elementary schools. So when the children come out of elementary school into ninth grade and they say, I want to go into high-tech manufacturing, they're not reading at the sixth grade level. They're reading somewhere near high school. All right.

So Santa Ana is struggling to expand this. Yeah. Because let's face it, this is collaboration. We're not into collaboration right now in our society. We're into confrontation. Who's the enemy? Who's responsible for this skills disaster? You have an enemies list? Usually when I speak to groups, business or educators, the business people blame the educators, the educators blame the business and the parents, the business people blame the unions, on and on and on it goes. Well, guess what? High School Link is made up of all these people. And they trust each other and they're putting their money where their mouth is. Why are they doing that? It's called survival because these local manufacturers are going to go out of business unless they can create long-term educated workforce. All right. Now that's one example. There's another Wisconsin. It's called the new North. These are the new North. The New North.

These are 19 counties in northern and eastern Wisconsin. They have a lot of manufacturing, and they too were running up against some of the same issues. I keynoted two conferences, summits for the New North, and they have gradually now set up collaborations with technical and community colleges, expanding apprenticeships. trying to improve K-12 education in that area of Wisconsin. I've spent a lot of time in North Dakota. North Dakota is doing the same thing. Everyone was leaving the state. It's a tiny population. And they did it to diversify the economy. So they have aerospace in Wisconsin. They have pharmaceuticals in Wisconsin. They have a large Microsoft. consulting center in Fargo. And they did it all for the same reason. The children were leaving, the small businesses were going out of business, and the tax base was going to hell. So this was a collaboration between local businesses and their communities.

And the politicians got involved, Democrat and Republican. Are we going to do that again? Well, I was very busy setting up Regional talent innovation networks. Retain the kids, retain the businesses, retain the tax base, grow the economy, go into new business sectors because you rebuild your local workforce. And that was very popular. I was very busy with this. I've written many books about this. Go on our website, imperialcorp. com. You'll see it all. You'll read all about this. COVID put an end to a lot of it. Because everything got shut down. And during that process, American learned hatred. Enemies lists. Let's blame someone for our problems now. It's not me. It's not that I don't push my kids hard enough in school. You know, my kids need time off. They need more sports, more video games, more Facebook pages. It's not that the teachers aren't working hard enough. And they need more education.

Or it's not that businesses are so focused on short-term profit. I mean, I taught strategic planning. I believe in strategic planning. You know? Both short-term and long-term. So a large part of what we're dealing with here is the angst of our society right now. How people look at the future. Is there a future? What is the future? Am I willing to work with others in my community and take a risk? Am I willing to sacrifice something now to survive for the future? Now, those of you out there that say, you know, Ed Gordon's a jerk. He doesn't understand business. I ask you this question. How are your children, your grandchildren? What future do they have in this society? Are they going to live as well as you do right now? Will America still be the world beater in technology and coming up with new innovation and ideas? This is a real crisis. And there are people out there who are willing to deal with it in your community.

But you've got to go out and look for them and ask and ask that and work with them to build a future for your community.

Yes, and please feel...