It can be easy in a recession, when millions of people are out of work, to forget the need to recruit new talent. But research presented in “Winning the Global Talent Showdown” (Barrett-Koehler, 2009, $27.95) argues the the world is headed toward a workforce disaster that will outlive many economic cycles if progress is not made soon.
By 2020, more than 70 million baby boomers will have retired, leaving 24 million jobs unfilled. Construction is not the only field that struggles; most every field in every country is competing against one another for workers. “We cannot outsource our way out of this shortage,” says author Edward E. Gordon. “Those days are over.”