The Great Resignation… the Big Quit… the Great Realization…
Whatever you called it, the pandemic heralded a seismic shift in how American workers viewed and approached work and their careers.
Instead of clinging to a job for life, millions in gainful employment decided to hand in their two week’s notice, without an offer for a new job or even a long term plan for their future, and see what happened next.
What happened next was economic instability, record-breaking inflation and mass layoffs (particularly in the tech sector), meaning having a job became more pressing than ever.
Four years on from the halcyon days of an abundance of jobs up for grabs—in July, the number of job openings in the U.S. fell to a 3.5 year low—the pendulum has firmly swung back in favor of employers.
The Great Resignation has made way for the so-called Great Stay, with knowledge-based workers now remaining in their current jobs for longer. However the fact remains that a labor shortage is looming.
While that might not make sense on the surface, with 76 million Baby Boomers getting ready to retire, the U.S. faces a substantial shortage of workers for decades to come.
“It would be tempting to think that the storm has passed—with ‘The Great Resignation’ over, the labor market will return to business as usual. But this wasn’t the storm itself; it was only a precursor to the real thing,” a new report by Lightcast states.
“The retirement of the Baby Boomers is a structural change, not a cyclical one, and the declining labor force participation of younger generations will be difficult to reverse.”
Additionally, job posting data shows that there is a high demand across many critical industries, and there is already a demand for more workers, more than the U.S. is projected to gain in the coming years.
This will be felt most acutely in the next five years, primarily in the healthcare and construction industries.
All growth in the labor force since 2019 can be attributed to foreign-born workers and although the working-age population is expected to grow by 18.7 million by 2032, labor force participation is expected to drop from 62.5 percent currently to 60.4 percent.
The result? The U.S. will have more people but less of them will be working, and although women are earning degrees and filling a number of roles in healthcare, they only account for around 2 percent of workers in traditionally male-dominated sectors such as contractors, plumbing, HVAC and auto maintenance.
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