Literature Review 1

Literature Review
When researching the connection between workforce development, massive layoffs and education I found the most prolific writer in this genre was Dr. Edward Gordon from Chicago. In the past ten years he has written three books that deal with this subject. His message is been a bell sounding the alarm louder and louder to the business community – it is time to pay attention to the demographics and to act.
In his first book, Skill Wars: Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit, Gordon begins by pointing out what now seems to have become a widely accepted reality that the foremost issue to be considered is the retirement of the “baby boomers” from the workforce over the next two decades. This is important because the two subsequent generations do not have the numbers of potential workers to fill the anticipated gap in knowledge jobs that will be generated by business demand. What Gordon fails to anticipate is the fact that due to a lack of savings over the lifetime, or the significant depletion of their 401K plans due to the Great Recession of 2008-2009, many of the boomers will not be able to retire and will remain in the workforce long after they reach retirement age. This is also possible because the average length of life continues to lengthen and people are healthy into their later years.
Skill Wars is full of great data that describes strategies for measuring the change in the workforce population and suggestions on how to address these impending human resource issues. As a result of Gordon’s many consulting projects and his education teaching experience, he has collected many real life examples to explain his reasoning. Also through his observations he is able to describe what is actually occurring in the workforce marketplace. Gordon predicts a second education revolution which is a constant theme in this book and the next two. The debate, he suggests, is really about how to completely re-think the educational system that we have today. The book has plenty of data graphs illustrating the point that the current educational outcomes do not measure any tangible success. As his first book focused on workforce issues, it was a foundational work that would eventually lead him to continue the focus in the next series of books. Skill Wars was issued to begin to make the business community aware of the approaching shift in the demographics and educational outcomes that was about to seriously affect the business community and its labor resources or talent.
In his second book, 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis, Gordon raises the volume of what he sees as a growing major crisis in education and workforce skills. This book highlights the many business strategies to attract highly skilled workers in the workforce and identifies some of the frustrations employers encounter in the hiring process. Some of the identified issues in this book include; 1) Utilizing H1-B visas to bring skilled workers into the US to fill jobs that Americans do not want to do, or do not have the skills and training to perform; 2) Outsourcing to other countries and the move in the age of globalization to move operations to the lowest cost producers in India and China; 3) Using Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to establish plants in other countries where the labor market has the capacity and skills to meet the needs of the manufacturer, and finally, 4) Acknowledging that the entire world and the major economies will experience these shortages in the years to come, making the skill gap a global issue and suggests that competition for talent will become fierce.
2010 Meltdown is full of data and additional stories substantiating the view of the author using statistically credible sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). To his credit, and with credit to his wife Elaine who is his researcher, Gordon provides a powerful and compelling picture of the issues surrounding workforce and education.
From a public policy point of view, he suggests that the federal intervention through the workforce investment system does not have the impact that is really needed and desired by the business community. This is because the capacity to serve the unemployed workers and make the attempt to correct all the failures of the educational system in order to produce skilled workers is not possible in a grossly underfunded federal intervention called the workforce investment system. If this is the intent of Congress, then the tiny amount of federal funding will not put a dent in the overall systemic problem.
This book is easy to read, full of facts and graphs, and very effectively targeted to the business leaders. The stories are compelling and persuasively translate the statistics into understandable implications for business owners. The book should also be a wake-up call to the higher education system.
In his most recent book, Winning the Global Talent Showdown: How Businesses and Communities can Partner to Rebuild the Jobs Pipeline, Gordon takes on a much more global view, comparing the United States educational and workforce development system to other countries in the world. Clearly, the message here is that the United States continues to fall behind and in its lack of real attention to educational reform, produces low skilled workers when the demand for these workers continues to diminish and is projected to continue to decline for the next twenty years. All this data has an effect on our economic well-being of the US and gives support to the need to change the education and training system. This author always puts a positive spin on the issue in that he believes it can be solved with the proper attention and a thoughtful and informed response to the issues he identifies.