Getting industry support for the skills and maintenance crisis is critical but even more critical is to get support from outside of industry, the general public, business and governmental leaders if we are going to see long lasting change and have the volume of talent pools developed to deal with the current exodus of the Boomer workforce.

Recently several news and blog posts have discussed with over 13 million unemployed US workers not able to locate a job the question of whether there is a skill shortage hoax or does employers truly have challenges to fill the estimated 3.5 million open positions.

What do you think?

Is it really a hoax? Are companies attendng job fairs, advertizing for vacancies with no jobs to fill? According to NAM 82% of companies can not find qualfied talent.