Ford can't fill 5,000 mechanic positions despite offering $120,000 salaries, nearly double the average American wage. CEO Jim Farley warns that the U.S. faces over a million openings in critical trades including emergency services, trucking, plumbers, and electricians. This isn't a temporary hiring challenge. It takes five years to learn the skills needed to work on a Ford Super Duty diesel engine, and the country isn't training enough people to do it.
Goldman Sachs analysis (via ZeroHedge, see [2] below) reveals the structural forces behind this crisis. The U.S. has added 4.5 million college-educated workers since 2019 while losing 800,000 workers without degrees. Labor demographer Ron Hetrick notes that baby boomers once supplied 65 million workers, but only 25 million remain, with no generation large enough to replace them. The workforce is projected to add just 5.9 million workers by 2034, with nearly half coming from workers over 65.
The mismatch creates real constraints. The automotive industry alone faces an annual shortfall of 37,000 trained technicians, while manufacturing has over 400,000 open positions despite 4.3% unemployment. Infrastructure projects requiring skilled labor face physical bottlenecks regardless of available capital. AI deployment, electrification, grid modernization, and manufacturing expansion all require technical skills that displaced knowledge workers can't easily provide.
There are early signs of correction. Trade school enrollment spiked 16% last year while four-year college enrollment declined. But this shift is happening slowly against demographic trends moving quickly. The gap between what the economy needs and what the education system produces represents one of the more significant structural challenges of the next decade.
Most interesting to me: while AI threatens to displace knowledge workers, physical infrastructure still requires human expertise that is difficult to automate. You cannot download the skill to rebuild a transmission or wire a electrical substation. The jobs most vulnerable to AI displacement (routine knowledge work) have large labor pools, while jobs resistant to automation (skilled physical labor requiring judgment and dexterity) face severe shortages.
[2] https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/labor-demographer-issues-warning-college-educated-oversupply-here