Massive shortage of knowledge workers

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1996

There is and will continue to be a massive shortage of knowledge workers--those individuals whose main value is their ability to gather, analyze, and disseminate information--through the year 2000. "The blue-collar worker is being replaced at a record pace, by the knowledge worker," according to Jeffrey E. Christian, president and CEO of Christian & Timbers, the Cleveland-based executive search firm. "Knowledge workers are required to have a good deal more formal education and continuous learning than their predecessor, the blue-collar worker. With this rigorous educational requirement, there is a tremendous strain on the economy. Industry can not just replace blue-collar workers with knowledge workers overnight the way displaced farmers and domestic workers were able to move into industrial jobs. This is obviously putting a real strain on our educational system."

Christian & Timbers predicts that 20% of the jobs by the turn of the century will be unfilled unless many present industrial workers are retrained to be knowledge workers. This means that the educational strain not only is on the educators, but on business as well. "If the business community expects knowledge workers to come from recruiting, they are mistaken," Christian warns. "We are dealing with a problem that is a shared one. The recruiting industry does not have enough people or places to recruit from to fill the knowledge worker jobs that are being created. Jobs that exist today will not be around in the year 2000; yet, we have workers right now that will still be around. This means that business and the educational institutions have a lot of work to do."