MT Magazine March/April 2025

FEATURE STORY

THE WORKFORCE ISSUE

14

Then, as companies worked their way through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to get to the other side of the pandemic, to what could be considered “normal,” new billboards began to appear – the likes of which had never been seen before. Suddenly, they displayed help wanted ads from industrial companies of all sizes. Here’s how things changed: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that U.S. civilian unemployment was at in the United States to be 4% to 5%. A simple way to think about it is as the lowest sustainable rate of unemployment that doesn’t cause inflation. So, in February 2020, the country was easily at full employment. Just two months later, in April 2020, the BLS reported U.S. unemployment was 14.8%. Improved but Challenging The U.S. economy is nothing if not resilient. By December 2020, unemployment declined to 6.7%, then to 3.9% in December 2021, 3.5% in December 2022, 3.8% in December 2023, and 4.1% in December 2024. And while the billboards began to come down, there was – and is – an abiding challenge facing industrial companies across the board. To borrow the title of a 1953 short story that you may recall from high school: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Finding people who can handle today’s tools is simply not easy, male or female. But it is necessary. Critical. And arguably different from what it was for many years. Consultancy PwC recently released its “2024 Workforce Radar Report.” Anthony Abbatiello, the workforce transformation practice leader at PwC U.S., was one of the authors of that study, which included surveying more than 18,000 employees, 2,600 business leaders, and 1,300 HR leaders. The report is both diagnostic in what it sees going on in the workplace and prescriptive for what leaders must do to hire and keep the people their companies need. You might have thought the word “critical” a couple of paragraphs above is an exaggeration. It is not. 3.5% in February 2020. Economists who use the NAIRU macroeconomic metric – the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment – typically consider “full employment”

Will You Be Viable? The PwC workforce report states: “45% of CEOs in PwC’s 27th Annual Globe CEO Survey told us their organizations won’t be viable in 10 years if they stay on their current path.” Abbatiello explains that these executives believe “consolidation will ultimately reduce competitors in their space” – meaning their company could get consolidated out of existence – “or with the pace of technology, there may be an obsolescence of their business.” What’s more, he notes many companies are divesting businesses and focusing more on specific operations. This means: (1) They need to have a strategy for their business that will be sustainable for at least 10 years, and (2) they need a workforce that can execute. Abbatiello and his colleagues recommend that in order to best position a company, it needs to become a talent magnet and a talent factory, where internal talent development occurs that tracks with the company’s strategic needs. The Magnet and the Factory Abbatiello emphasizes that a company being a talent magnet or talent factory isn’t a case of being one or the other: “It is an ‘and.’ They have to be both. Depending on where they are in terms of their business cycle – say reinventing their business or being a nascent startup in a growth mode – they have to use both the dials of talent magnet and talent factory to drive their business.” Abbatiello acknowledges that a company in growth mode requires the right talent. In these cases, being a magnet is important. “But in more mature sectors, where they may not be doing a ton of hiring, it is really about dialing up the talent factory piece – but that doesn’t mean they can abandon being a talent magnet.” Being a talent magnet means making the company a desirable place to work by publicly emphasizing its external brand, employee value proposition, and other company characteristics with which people would want to associate. A talent factory is where learning platforms and leadership training benefit employees and are tailored to benefit the overall organization. Abbatiello puts it plainly: “There is a fight for in demand skills. Skills are the new currency.” You want to get them (magnet). You want to maintain and optimize them (factory).

Not Easier Soon (If Ever) As it says in the PwC report: “The battle for top talent is fierce, and there’s no