Don’t show ‘em the money (even if you have it). Here are nine better ways to boost morale.
By Ilya Pozin | @ilyaNeverSleeps | Nov 28, 2011

The ability to motivate employees is one of the greatest skills an entrepreneur can possess. Two years ago, I realized I didn’t have this skill. So I hired a CEO who did.

Josh had 12 years in the corporate world, which included running a major department at Comcast. I knew he was seasoned, but I was still skeptical at first. We were going through some tough growing pains, and I thought that a lack of cash would make it extremely difficult to improve the company morale.

I was wrong.

With his help and the help of the great team leaders he put in place, Josh not only rebuilt the culture, but also created a passionate, hard-working team that is as committed to growing and improving the company as I am.

Here are nine things I learned from him:

Be generous with praise. Everyone wants it and it’s one of the easiest things to give. Plus, praise from the CEO goes a lot farther than you might think. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Once you’re comfortable delivering praise one-on-one to an employee, try praising them in front of others.
Get rid of the managers. Projects without project managers? That doesn’t seem right! Try it. Removing the project lead or supervisor and empowering your staff to work together as a team rather then everyone reporting to one individual can do wonders. Think about it. What’s worse than letting your supervisor down? Letting your team down! Allowing people to work together as a team, on an equal level with their co-workers, will often produce better projects faster. People will come in early, stay late, and devote more of their energy to solving problems.
Make your ideas theirs. People hate being told what to do. Instead of telling people what you want done; ask them in a way that will make them feel like they came up with the idea. “I’d like you to do it this way” turns into “Do you think it’s a good idea if we do it this way?”
Never criticize or correct. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear that they did something wrong. If you’re looking for a de-motivator, this is it. Try an indirect approach to get people to improve, learn from their mistakes, and fix them. Ask, “Was that the best way to approach the problem? Why not? Have any ideas on what you could have done differently?” Then you’re having a conversation and talking through solutions, not pointing a finger.
Make everyone a leader. Highlight your top performers’ strengths and let them know that because of their excellence, you want them to be the example for others. You’ll set the bar high and they’ll be motivated to live up to their reputation as a leader.
Take an employee to lunch once a week. Surprise them. Don’t make an announcement that you’re establishing a new policy. Literally walk up to one of your employees, and invite them to lunch with you. It’s an easy way to remind them that you notice and appreciate their work.
Give recognition and small rewards. These two things come in many forms: Give a shout out to someone in a company meeting for what she has accomplished. Run contests or internal games and keep track of the results on a whiteboard that everyone can see. Tangible awards that don’t break the bank can work too. Try things like dinner, trophies, spa services, and plaques.
Throw company parties. Doing things as a group can go a long way. Have a company picnic. Organize birthday parties. Hold a happy hour. Don’t just wait until the holidays to do a company activity; organize events throughout the year to remind your staff that you’re all in it together.
Share the rewards—and the pain. When your company does well, celebrate. This is the best time to let everyone know that you’re thankful for their hard work. Go out of your way to show how far you will go when people help your company succeed. If there are disappointments, share those too. If you expect high performance, your team deserves to know where the company stands. Be honest and transparent.

In ‘The Rare Find,’ George Anders looks at how the U.S. Special Forces, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, basketball scouts and others identify and hire exceptional talent.

Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need

The conventional wisdom is that our education system is failing our economy. But our companies deserve a lot of the blame themselves.

By PETER CAPPELLI

Everybody’s heard the complaints about recruiting lately.Even with unemployment hovering around 9%, companies are grousing that they can’t find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.

Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren’t giving kids the right kind of training. The government isn’t letting in enough high-skill immigrants. The list goes on and on.

But I believe that the real culprits are the employers themselves.

With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.

Bad for Companies, Bad for Economy

Andrea Levy

In other words, to get a job, you have to have that job already. It’s a Catch-22 situation for workers—and it’s hurting companies and the economy.

To get America’s job engine revving again, companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation’s education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.

There are plenty of ways to get workers up to speed without investing too much time and money, such as putting new employees on extended probationary periods and relying more on internal hires, who know the ropes better than outsiders would.

It’s a fundamental change from business as usual. But the way we’re doing things now just isn’t working.

The Big Myths

The perceptions about a lack of skilled workers are pervasive. The staffing company ManpowerGroup, for instance, reports that 52% of U.S. employers surveyed say they have difficulty filling positions because of talent shortages.

But the problem is an illusion.

Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can’t get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That’s an affordability problem, not a skill shortage. A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages. We wouldn’t say there is a shortage of diamonds when they are incredibly expensive; we can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.

The real problem, then, is more appropriately an inflexibility problem. Finding candidates to fit jobs is not like finding pistons to fit engines, where the requirements are precise and can’t be varied. Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.

Only about 10% of the people in IT jobs during the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s, for example, had IT-related degrees. While it might be great to have a Ph.D. graduate read your electrical meter, almost anyone with a little training could do the job pretty well.

A Training Shortage

And make no mistake: There are plenty of people out there who could step into jobs with just a bit of training—even recent graduates who don’t have much job experience. Despite employers’ complaints about the education system, college students are pursuing more vocationally oriented course work than ever before, with degrees in highly specialized fields like pharmaceutical marketing and retail logistics.

Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand. Much of that includes what vendors do when they bring in new equipment: “Here’s how to work this copier.”

The shortage of opportunities to learn on the job helps explain the phenomenon of people queueing up for unpaid internships, in some cases even paying to get access to a situation where they can work free to get access to valuable on-the-job experience.

Companies in other countries do things differently. In Europe, for instance, training is often mandated, and apprenticeships and other programs that help provide work experience are part of the infrastructure.

The result: European countries aren’t having skill-shortage complaints at the same level as in the U.S., and the nations that have the most established apprenticeship programs—the Scandinavian nations, Germany and Switzerland—have low unemployment.

Employers here at home rightly point to a significant constraint that they face in training workers: They train them and make the investment, but then someone else offers them more money and hires them away.

The Way Forward

That is a real problem. What’s the answer?

We aren’t going to get European-style apprenticeships in the U.S. They require too much cooperation among employers and bigger investments in infrastructure than any government entity is willing to provide. We’re also not going to go back to the lifetime-employment models that made years-long training programs possible.

But I’m also convinced that some of the problem we’re up against is simply a failure of imagination. Here are three ways in which employees can get the skills they need without the employer having to invest in a lot of upfront training.

Work with education providers: If job candidates don’t have the skills you need, make them go to school before you hire them.

Community colleges in many states, especially North Carolina, have proved to be good partners with employers by tailoring very applied course work to the specific needs of the employer. Candidates qualify to be hired once they complete the courses—which they pay for themselves, at least in part. For instance, a manufacturer might require that prospective job candidates first pass a course on quality control or using certain machine tools.

Going back to school isn’t just for new hires, either; it also works for internal candidates. In this setup, the employer pays the tuition costs through tuition reimbursement. But the employees make the bigger investment by spending their own time, almost always off work, learning the material.

Bring back aspects of apprenticeship: In this arrangement, apprentices are paid less while they are mastering their craft—so employers aren’t paying for training and a big salary at the same time. Accounting firms, law firms and professional-services firms have long operated this way, and have made lots of money off their young associates.

Of course, a full apprenticeship model—with testing and credentials associated with different stages of experience—wouldn’t work in all industries. But a simpler setup would: Companies could give their new workers a longer probationary period—with lower pay—until they get up to speed on the requirements of the job.

Promote from within: Employees have useful knowledge that no outsider could have and should make great candidates for filling jobs higher up. In recent years, however, an incredible two-thirds of all vacancies, even in large companies, have been filled by hiring from the outside, according to data from Taleo Corp., a talent-management company. That figure has dropped somewhat lately because of market conditions. But a generation ago, the number was close to 10%, as internal promotions and transfers were used to fill virtually all positions.

These days, many companies simply don’t believe their own workers have the necessary skills to take on new roles. But, once again, many workers could step into those jobs with a bit of training.

And there’s one on-the-job education strategy that doesn’t cost companies a dime: Organize work so that employees are given projects that help them learn new skills. For example, a marketing manager may not know how to compute the return on marketing programs but might learn that skill while working on a team project with colleagues from the finance department.

Pursuing options like these vastly expands the supply of talent that employers can tap, making it both cheaper and easier to fill jobs. Of course, it’s also much better for society. It helps build the supply of human capital in the economy, as well as opening the pathway for more people to get jobs.

It’s an important instance where company self-interest and societal interest just happen to coincide.

Dr. Cappelli is the George W. Taylor professor of management at the Wharton School and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

IT hiring ticks up for the third straight year, and IT pros with programming skills will be first in line for jobs.
Rick Saia
September 26, 2011 (Computerworld)

Slowly but surely, many U.S. companies are loosening their viselike grips on IT hiring and looking to add new staffers to bolster business growth in the year ahead.

That trend is reflected in Computerworld’s annual Forecast survey. Nearly 29% of the 353 IT executives polled said they plan to increase IT staffing through next summer. That’s up from 23% in the 2010 survey and 20% in the 2009 survey. Altogether, it’s a 45% increase in hiring expectations over the past two years.
Tiny Upticks

What changes, if any, do you expect in your IT employee head count in the next 12 months?

Increase: 29%
Decrease: 17%
Remain the same: 54%

Source: Computerworld’s exclusive Forecast 2012 survey, June 2011. Base: 353 IT executives

“We’re seeing [strong hiring] across the board,” among organizations of all sizes, says Mike McBrierty, chief operations officer for the technology staffing division of Eliassen Group, an IT recruiting firm. He says there has been pent-up demand for infrastructure upgrades and investments that had been shelved over the previous three years.

The Forecast survey also revealed that IT managers may be thinking about innovation, not merely keeping the lights on, as they plan their staffs for 2012. Respondents said these nine skills will be in demand.
1. Programming and Application Development

• 61% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, up from 44% in the 2010 survey.

This large year-over-year jump doesn’t surprise people like John Reed, executive director of staffing firm Robert Half Technology, who sees demand for a variety of skills in areas ranging from website development to upgrading internal systems and meeting the needs of mobile users. “Web development continues to be very strong” as companies try to improve the user experience, he says, adding that there will also be a lot of effort to develop mobile technologies to improve customer access via smartphones.

Mobile application development is especially hot in healthcare, says Randy Bankes, associate director of IT at Lehigh Valley Health Network, a multicampus healthcare system in Allentown, Pa. Bankes says he’s had a “god-awful hard time” trying to hire people with skills in mobile technologies. “It’s competitive as hell right now,” says Bankes.

Bill Predmore, director of enterprise application support at the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Austin, also sees growth in mobile technology, especially in the transportation industry. “There’s more and more of a push to implement whiz-bang Web stuff, along with making trip planners, [bus and train] route data and schedule data presentable on mobile devices,” he says.
2. Project Management

• 44% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, up from 43% in the 2010 survey.

Big projects need managers, but they also need business analysts who can identify users’ needs and translate them for the IT staffers who have to meet those needs and complete projects on time. “The demand has been more for business analysts than project managers,” Reed says — in other words, those who can help deliver projects rather than merely oversee and monitor them.

That’s what Sean Masters discovered when he embarked on a job search in March. “When I was framing myself as a systems, network, security or other administrator role, I was hardly getting any attention,” says the IT professional from Worcester, Mass. “As soon as I shifted my résumé to list those specific technologies used in accomplishing specific projects, I was suddenly framing myself as an engineer who could not only manage systems, but also plan, design and implement them.”
3. Help Desk/Technical Support

• 35% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, down from 43% in the 2010 survey.

As long as technology is used in the workplace, there will be a need for support staffers, be they internal or remote. And in organizations such as Lehigh Valley Health Network, help desk and tech support are points of entry for IT professionals and places to pick up the skills that can advance them into, say, a programming or systems analyst role, says Bankes.

But mobile operating systems “have added a new dimension to help desk and tech support,” says David Foote, CEO of IT staffing consultancy Foote Partners. “There are so many operating systems now that the mobile platform, and especially tablets, have quickly shoved aside the old Windows/Mac OS PC desktop axis.”
4. Networking

• 35% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, down from 38% in the 2010 survey.

Robert Half’s Reed says IT professionals with networking skills continue to be in high demand and have been “for a few quarters.” That demand has been fueled, in part, by virtualization and cloud computing projects. In fact, during his recent job search, Masters says he saw heavy interest in virtualization skills.

Reed says hiring managers are looking for people with “practical work experience” in the networking arena, especially if they have worked in an organization that has migrated to a virtualized or cloud-based environment. In particular, they’re looking for people with VMware and Citrix experience.

As for certifications, they’re important but they’re “not driving the market one way or the other,” he says.
5. Business Intelligence

• 23% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, up from 13% in the 2010 survey.

Eliassen Group’s McBrierty says his firm is starting to see more demand for IT professionals skilled in BI. The uptick indicates a shift from focusing on cost savings to investing in technology that provides access to real-time data, enabling better business decisions.

That may happen at Lorillard Tobacco, says Dan Clark, manager of server and desktop technology. The $6 billion company is looking to expand its use of Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software from about 175 users to more than 2,000, he says. “This will require additional head count to develop and administer,” Clark says, adding that he’s especially interested in SharePoint developers.
6. Data Center

• 18% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, down from 21% in the 2010 survey.

Like networking, data center operations will be impacted by organizations’ virtualization and cloud strategies. In particular, Reed says, hiring managers will be looking for IT professionals with backgrounds in data center operations and systems integration.

In addition, the demands of having data available to achieve guaranteed IT service levels underscore the need for people who are experts in disaster recovery and business continuity, according to Bob Cuneo, CIO at Eliassen Group. Companies need to ensure that the systems that users depend on will be there when they need them, and those systems need to be backed up and replicated, he says.
7. Web 2.0

• 18% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, up from 17% in the 2010 survey.

Technical skills centered around social media remain in demand today, as more industries look for ways to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their infrastructures, and Reed says he expects that demand to continue in 2012. He sees .Net, AJAX and PHP as key back-end skills, with HTML, XML, CSS, Flash and Javascript, among others, on the front end. “Organizations know they need to engage their customers via online platforms, and professionals who can support these initiatives will continue to command a premium in 2012,” Reed says.
8. Security

• 17% plan to hire for this skill the next 12 months, down from 32% in the 2010 survey.

The one-year drop may be surprising given that information security threats are a moving target, but security is a top-level concern for many organizations, especially those that are considering cloud computing as part of their IT strategies, says Reed.

Corey Peissig, senior vice president of technical operations at Mortgagebot, a Web-based mortgage software provider, says security is a top priority at his company. “Strong technical security and auditing skills are in high demand in our business,” he says. “The challenge is that good talent in this arena is sometimes difficult to find.”
9 Telecommunications

• 9% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, down from 17% in the 2010 survey.

“We have an aggressive agenda to upgrade communications systems,” with a strong need for voice-over-IP help, says Laurie Connors, a human resources official who handles IT hiring at Partners HealthCare, a Boston-based healthcare organization that includes the renowned Massachusetts General Hospital.

That’s why Partners will be looking for telecommunications expertise in the coming year. Foote says he sees demand for people with IP telephony skills, and for those familiar with Cisco IPCC call center systems.

Although there may be some concerns about the resiliency of the U.S. economy over the next year, the three-year trend in hiring plans highlighted in Computerworld’s Forecast survey indicates that IT hiring budgets are expanding. “We’re in a cycle now where it’s more about innovation than cost savings,” says Reed. “You can only create so much efficiency, [and] you can only reduce so much cost.”

The future of IT jobs? It’s in three types of roles
By Jason Hiner | July 26, 2011, 3:00am PDT

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.
Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.
Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.
When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.
Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.
That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.
So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?
1. Consultants
Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.
2. Project managers
Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.
3. Developers
By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.
This article was originally published on TechRepublic.

July 25, 2011: 5:00 AM ET

Lawmakers in Washington are ignoring the real problem: A generation is losing work skills. We need to fix that.

By Nina Easton, senior editor-at-large

FORTUNE — Has anyone in Washington noticed that 20% of American men are not working? That’s right. One out of five men in this country are collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents. The equivalent number in 1970, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, was 7%.

Both political parties have proven their talent in ginning up outrage over the federal budget, whether it’s spiraling spending or millionaires collecting tax breaks on private jets. So today a tiresome, and dangerous, debt drama unfolds in real time, freezing leaders in both parties in their respective partisan corners. Are these same leaders capable of confronting the fearsome fact that 4.3 million Americans have been jobless not just for months–but going on years? We are in danger of losing a generation of work-habituated Americans, especially men–and lawmakers can’t see their way past November, 2012.

This is a conversation that goes beyond a stubbornly high 9.2% unemployment rate and last week’s unnerving news that company layoffs are ticking up again. While we all know there is a job shortage, employers are increasingly talking about a “talent shortage” — they can’t find qualified workers even for the jobs that are available. “We found that 30% of companies surveyed had openings for six months or longer, and can’t find the right person,” says Susan Lund, research director for the McKinsey Global Institute.

With slack demand, companies can afford to be pickier about who they hire — and commonly steal away already-employed workers rather than dip into a riskier pool of people who have been out of work for months or years. “As long as there is slow demand, [they say] ‘I can delay hiring and when I do hire a person it’s the perfect person,’” says Jeff Joerres, president and CEO of ManpowerGroup.

Google (GOOG) has anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 jobs open at any given time that take months and months to fill, says Laszlo Bock, the company’s senior vice president of people operations. And it’s not just computer and engineering skills that companies need. Frits van Paasschen, CEO of the Starwood (HOT) hotel chain, says “we have a whole set of jobs”—like international tax accountant—”where we can’t find” qualified applicants. Joerres says the No. 1 need for companies right now is sales person: Someone skilled not only in personal relations but also able to master the details of an integrated supply chain.

All three executives spoke at an Atlantic magazine-sponsored jobs forum last week that exposed a stark disconnect between the jobs that are available—and the increasingly rusty skill-sets of those who are unemployed, especially for long periods of time. People have “no idea what skills they should have to find a job,” says Bock.

That’s a place where businesses have to start stepping up to the plate. It’s true that McKinsey reports an expansion of training programs. And there are companies like Delta partnering with a state university to produce airline-ready managers and associations like the Manufacturing Institute working with community colleges on certificate programs. But Joerres says a lot of companies don’t offer training for prospective employees because—with slack consumer demand and weak job market—they don’t have to. “If they don’t have to, they aren’t going to,” he says.

The longer a worker is unemployed, the farther he or she falls behind in sellable skills in a fast-paced global economy. But there is an even more fundamental question behind the rise in long-term employed rates: Are our public policies contributing to the rise of millions of Americans who lose the habit of work?

Whether you believe (as some economists do) that unemployment insurance discourages immediate job searching—or not—it’s worth asking whether the American “unemployment” system should more closely follow a program like Germany’s “re-employment” system, which cut stubborn long-term unemployment rates in that country.

And then there is federal disability insurance, where the percent of American adults collecting checks has doubled since 1989 — even though the American population isn’t any less healthy, or more mentally disabled (the fastest growing disability claim). “It is difficult to overstate the role that the [disability program] plays in discouraging…the ongoing employment of non-elderly adults,” concludes a study by MIT’s David H. Autor and the University of Maryland’s Mark Duggan.

If that’s not enough to grab the attention of political leaders, here’s a 10-year peek into the future of the U.S. labor force if current trends continue: A continued expansion of workers collecting income from disability rolls plus another four million high school dropouts–on top of today’s 15.4 million.

And yet, according to a ManpowerGroup report, at the same time companies will face an “acute talent shortage.”

Where’s the outrage over that?

The 6 hottest new jobs in IT