Thousands of US Job Openings, so Few Applicants
Siemens Corp in the US has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. Caterpillar and Motorola at any given time has 200 job openings. Some companies report job vacancies from a low of 6 to a high of 200. Some of these positions are left unfilled for at least nine months. Average starting salary? US$89,000 a year.
What's wrong with this picture?
With the unemployment rate at 9.1% as of September 2011, it seems it is not because of job availability. ManpowerGroup conducted a survey and found that 52% of U.S. employers have problems filling up important positions within their organizations. That's 14% up from 2010 numbers.
These jobs are not even low paying jobs. Starting salaries for some of the job openings range from US$75,000 to US$100,000 a year. In Siemens, the average salary offered for the starting positions is US$89,000 a year.
The problem is that there are few qualified people applying for the jobs. Companies are having difficulty finding applicants with the correct job skills.
There are fewer American students taking math and science courses than before. Students in Math, engineering, technology and computer science accounted for 11.1% of graduates in 1980. That share dropped to 8.9% in 2009.
In this situation, unemployment is a structural problem. Workers lack the skills needed to fill the jobs. US graduates do not have the correct skill set to start with.
Currently, companies are turning to military veterans to address the situation. Eric Spiegel, president and CEO of Siemens Corp. said, "We have found that veterans have extensive technical training and experience that they gain through military service, and these skills are extremely valuable to us and match up well with many of our over 3,000 open positions,"
Siemens has hired 450 military veterans so far this year.
President and CEO of Contour Precision Group, Dennis Bray says, "Many of the younger kids that are coming out of college have been discouraged to go into manufacturing,...A lot of the college graduates have chosen a curriculum and degree that does not give them the necessary science and math skills to be of immediate benefit to companies such as ours."
In the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, there were 240,000 openings in manufacturing in August. That figure is up 38.7 percent from last year.
The situation has become serious for the companies now that they are pushing congress to address the issue of US visas and hiring more high-skilled foreigners.
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