A Productive Work Force

Missouri has long been known for boasting a workforce with a nearly unmatched work ethic. When employers today say they wish they could see more of that attribute, it’s not because employees aren’t bringing it with them each day.

It’s that there aren’t enough candidates to fill the critical needs of Missouri businesses. The rapid advance of technology across all sectors—including agricultural and manufacturing—means more companies are seeking skill sets that simply haven’t been in demand in the past.

Well, they are now.

As of June 2022, Missouri’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent, well below the threshold that many economists classify as technically full employment. In short, almost everyone who wants to work is working.

Even the battered hospitality sector, nearly brought to its knees in 2020 by business operating restrictions during the early stages of the pandemic, has bounced back to become the state’s fourth-largest employment category, with more than 290,000 employees.

A look at the employment data confirms that ours is a service economy: 85.6 percent of the non-farm employment is engaged in some form of service work. That’s nearly 2.5 million people, compared to slightly more than 417,000 in the goods-producing sphere.

The latter includes both manufacturing and construction. Ranking the Top 10 sectors by employment totals, they come in at No. 5 and No. 7, respectively.

The challenges for employers show up with job openings: 222,000 in Missouri as of April this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At that level, slightly more than 7 percent of the jobs available in the state were simply not filled, roughly matching the openings rate nationwide.

And nationwide, the going is tough. According to the BLS, the phenomenon known as the Great Resignation—or The Big Quit—accelerated in 2021, with nearly 4 million people resigning from their jobs every month. Two generations, in particular, are driving that because they’re the two biggest ones in the nation’s history—Baby Boomers, on the upper end, passing the retirement-age threshold at a rate of 10,000 a day, and Millennials, many of them leaving unfulfilling work for greener pastures.

Layered over that is the changing nature of work itself, with increasing numbers of people refusing to go back to office and cubicle work in favor of working from home. In many cases, employers starving for talent are accommodating those demands, even if that’s not their preferred work dynamic.

Here’s where all of that leaves Missouri employers: The Missouri Economic Research and Information Center showed that, as of June 2022, companies in the state had more than 96,000 online job postings. That was down sharply from the previous month but still higher than any other point since the pandemic jobs recovery began in the spring of 2020.

Leading that list were hospitals and healthcare facilities, far and away No. 1, followed by restaurants, insurance carriers, educational institutions, and traveler accommodations. Note again that  the hospitality sector accounted for two of those five, combining as many openings as the health-care settings.

Within occupational titles, the biggest need was for registered nurses, followed by IT professionals in software and computer operations, managerial roles in entertainment and recreational fields, then sales positions in wholesale/manufacturing and retail.

The upside for employers in Missouri is that a large percentage of the entry-level workforce is migrating to urban centers from rural areas or is often just a generation removed from the farm and the agricultural work ethic. Those farms are famous for producing workers who are self-reliant, understand that what needs to be done must actually get done, and aren’t afraid to put in the extra time to advance organizational goals. 

On the farm, people learned to play after the work was done. In the factory, that same mindset translates into higher levels of productivity and reduced absenteeism. In the workplace, that pushed Missouri into the nation’s Top 10 and No. 7 overall in terms of the BLS’s rankings for percentage increases in labor productivity last year.

For employees, employers, and customers of all walks, that’s a formula for win-win-win.