Demographic Decline Feeds into the Global Skills Shortage

The skilled worker pinch is being felt from Europe to the Anglosphere to Asia to Africa to Russia to Latin America. An increasingly high tech global economic base requires large numbers of well trained and adaptable workers to support the needed infrastructures. But in a world where more capable peoples are dying out and less capable peoples are moving in to take their places, it will become more difficult to find skilled, adaptable workers of high aptitude and reliability.

In Russia

While Russian officials and international commentators are noting increased concern at the state of the Russian economy and the worsening situation for its vast labor force, numerous jobs have gone unfilled, even in national security-related enterprises. … Dmitry Medvedev noted in 2014 that “trained and skilled workers and laborers are now sorely lacking in virtually all (industrial) sectors…We need to change stereotypes about the low prestige of these professions.” __ http://www.realclearworld.com/blog/2016/03/russia_cant_find_enough_skilled_workers_111746.html

This lack of skilled workers is only a part of Russia’s ongoing demographic tragedy, which is simultaneously seeing a significant shrinkage in the number of women of child-bearing age and the number of healthy men able to serve in Russia’s struggling armed forces.

In Asia

A Manpower Group survey shows that 48% of employers had difficulty filling vacancies in Asia in 2015, compared to 28% in 2006. Meanwhile, university graduates, including 45% in South Korea, are struggling to find jobs. __ http://economia.icaew.com/opinion/february-2016/addressing-the-skills-shortage-in-asia

In the US

The US falls near the middle of the pack in terms of difficulty filling skilled worker jobs. The problem is finding qualified and experienced applicants for particular jobs. Many people with academic credentials may lack the experience, professionalism, and work ethic required to see a difficult job through to the finish.

The US has the advantage of being able to attract skilled applicants from around the world. But due to a sub-par government educational system — and the lack of meaningful apprenticeship positions and secondary level vocational training — much local talent is being squandered.

Average Global IQ is In Steady Decline

The Lynn – Flynn effect is unable to counteract the global decline in average human IQ, for many reasons. As a result, the skilled manpower shortage is likely to grow steadily worse over the next several decades. Intelligent and skilled workers from the third world and emerging nations such as Russia are likely to continue to flee their homelands for more profitable pastures abroad. Poor and low IQ nations will lose their most talented people at an accelerating rate.

If Putin and Xi can be prevented from starting World War III, we are likely to see an increasingly stratified global picture, with the Anglosphere pulling ahead of an increasingly multicultural Europe, followed by China, Japan / South Korea, then India, then Turkey / Russia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, with Africa and the rest of the third world acting as a growing drag on the global economy and human progress.

Online Training Will Prove a Stopgap Measure

For persons with aptitude and self-discipline, online training can overcome difficulties of transportation, high tuition, and the need to work set hours. This will help to offset some of the human skills shortages. In addition, trained mid-level persons will increasingly substitute for higher level professionals as needs develop, using both online and offline training.

But when the human substrate cannot comprehend the necessary knowledge, nor develop the crucial competencies needed for the job, skills shortages will grow — and the infrastructure will suffer strain and eventual breakdown.

Resilient and Dangerous Communities Can Form Nuclei of Competence

As the dysgenic Idiocracy grows and infrastructures collapse, islands of competence can bridge the quagmires of decay and degeneracy. These islands — or nuclei — of competence need to be built now, while there is the time and talent to do so.

Dangerous Children learn how to build Networked Dangerous Communities in their childhood training, and how to instill robust resilience and anti-fragility into such networked communities. These are not easy or prevalent skills, and many of the skills involved will seem counter-intuitive and even extreme to most complacent persons of the modern age. For many, it is too late to introduce them to the problems, much less to convince them.

Time is passing, and the need to prepare — to make provisions — for the future grows.