What Does This Mean for the Construction Industry?
As part of my morning routine, I listen to Albert Mohler’s podcast: The Briefing. This past Friday’s episode started out talking about the falling birth rate and the effect this will have on the world.
We’ve heard how extreme this situation is in some countries like South Korea, China, and Japan. Dr. Mohler pointed out that this is not just happening in these countries, but around the world.
This is a problem because ultimately, if we continue down this path, there’s not a future for civilization if you’re not having babies.
A falling birthrate means you’re not going to have enough workers.
You’re going to have more aging people leaving the workplace than younger people joining it.
Just look at what’s happening in Japan, where they are using robots to take care of people in nursing homes. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a robot taking care of one of my family members.
The Communist Party of China enforced a one-child-only policy to prevent a future threat where they had too many babies. It turns out, the threat is too few.
They’ve ended up with an imbalance of males to females because of the preference for male babies. Now, there are millions of Chinese men who aren’t able to marry anyone because there aren’t enough women.
That’s a shortage in the tens of millions.
This got me to thinking about how the struggle of finding good, qualified help in the construction industry.
This is not a new problem but seems to be a growing one.
I think this is due to more than just the decreasing population. I think it’s a combination of a society that has gotten spoiled and untrained.
A lot of young people see life as something owed to them. They’ve not had to learn to work. Then, you have those of us who’ve been doing construction for a long time. We’ve been too focused on our work and never bothered to share our experiences and knowledge.
It doesn’t matter if the shrinking number of qualified people is due to a shrinking or an untrained work force.
What matters is getting the ones that are out there, trained.
That’s why I’m working to find ways to coach and consult people in the construction industry that need some mentoring and guidance.