If supply chain issues aren’t bad enough, the short supply of skilled workers is contributing to inflation, along with the high demand for certain products this holiday season.
The industries with the most job openings during the labor shortage are the transportation industry, the health care and social assistance industries and the accommodation and food industries, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
By having fewer workers available, the production and manufacture of certain products becomes more expensive and harder to supply. By fighting this labor shortage, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, prices could begin trending downward.
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What skilled workers are needed?
Indeed recently listed the top 20 jobs that are in highest demand, as posted on its website. These jobs include registered nurses, optometrists, site-reliability engineers, pharmacists and real estate agents. Many of the in-demand jobs are in the health care industry.
All of these positions require some sort of education or training that takes time to get, which leads to the question, “How much time will it take to leave the labor shortage behind us?”
There’s no way of knowing for sure, but economist Dante DeAntonio of Moody’s Analytics predicted last year that the labor shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic would end near the middle or end of 2023, according to USA Today.
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What’s causing a labor shortage?
This shortage is because of the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors like the “great resignation,” which both left 10 million job openings but only about 5 million unemployed workers to fill them, per the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
A study by the National Bureau of Economics found that COVID-19 reduced the U.S. workforce by hundreds of thousands.
“Many who fall ill but survive Covid-19 suffer from enduring health problems,” according to the study. “Approximately 500,000 adults are neither working nor actively looking for work due to the persistent effects of Covid-19 illnesses.”
The leisure and hospitality industry — one of the most affected by the pandemic — is expected to be the fastest-growing industry as the nation recovers and people want to go out more, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
