Shortage of Skills

Report Outline
Current Mixed Employment Situation
New Directions in Vocational Training
Federal Manpower Training Programs

Current Mixed Employment Situation

A Growing shortage of skilled workers threatens to slow down the economic growth of the United States. Thousands of openings for skilled and semi-skilled workers in industrial and service enterprises are going begging at a time when 4.5 per cent of the labor force is unemployed. The paradox of persistent joblessness alongside job vacancies reflects failure of educational and vocational training to keep pace with the accelerated tempo of economic change.

In an age of automation, as many workers as possible must be prepared by education to take on new and different jobs if and when old jobs are changed or made obsolete by technological developments. Yet modernization of the nation's manpower skills has only recently become a field for determined effort on the part of business, industry, labor unions, and local, state and national government.

There is now an awareness that until work skills more nearly match the needs of employers, joblessness will remain at unnecessarily high levels and economic expansion will proceed at an uneven rate. As President Johnson stated in his annual manpower report to Congress in March 1965, “We must have large quantities of highly trained manpower in many professional and technical fields if we are to obtain the rate and types of growth we seek for the future.”