Shrinking the Growing Skills Gap

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Achieve, educational advocacy group which promotes making high school graduates career, college and citizen-ready have combined to create increasing awareness of the growing skills gap situation in the United States in order to work toward solutions to shrink it.

This is one of the great issues among the generations of our times.  Increasingly, our educational efforts and our jobs-producing economic efforts are pulling in different directions.  SHRM and Achieve report in today’s WSJ (page B7) that 67% of today’s full-time staff hiring organizations are having difficulty filling positions, up from 52% just two years ago.  The SHRM and Achieve placed ad does not say what kinds of skills are missing, but the majority seem to be in two areas.  That which is commonly known as STEM…Science, Technology, Engineering and Math as well as in what are typically known as soft skills…communication, relationships, getting…