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.

To cope with economic challenges many municipalities, school systems, government operations, and businesses have been saving money by deferring their maintenance activities.

Is deferring maintenance a smart way to control costs? Are these short term focused decisions causing long term catastrophes?

Have you seen Deferred MaintenaXe? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QEHfd-hZG8

As I am like everyone else around the globe glued to the coverage of the Summer Olympics, I wonder why are these skills deemed to be so important that they are medal worthy? Why are athletes deemed to be so important?

So many of the Olympic skills developed are absolutely useless in propelling our economies forward, meanwhile we have severe shortages at critical technical skills where millions of jobs worldwide are going unfilled.

America used to be the land of milk and honey. However, America has now become the land of the obese and diabetic.

As we are striving to boost our maintenance performance levels, we must also need to take on the health challenges to avoid future failures of our workforce.

As we enter the ten year anniversary of the Maintenance Crisis song, we have been getting some great ideas on methods to celebrate and continue to leverage the song to bring more attention to the challenges of the maintenance crisis so more resources emerge.

Do you have some ideas to share? What do you recommend we do so more hear and support the fight against the maintenance crisis?

Below are just some of the ideas suggested thus far:

Send out links to every radio station and TV station and encourage them to play the songs and videos.

Whenever we endure the horrific natural and manmade tragedies makes us pause to reflect and strive to answer the unanswerable, solve the unsolvable and strive to fix the unfixable. Since we are enduring life imitating fiction again, we get to see first hand the horror of real tragedy and not able to enjoy another violent simulation developed to capture attention and strive to satisfy our society's unquenchable thirst to escape and be entertained with fabricated conflict.

Below is an excerpt of a heart to heart discussion I just had with a group of a dozen future workers. I am sharing this to help other workforce activists in their quest to elevate the performance of our future workers. Also please note, these are great "kids" 17-19 year olds who just need some guidance and development to help propel them to new heights. What was stated below was not to tear them down but to challenge them upward to higher levels of workforce performance.

Since we live in uncertain times and since many of us either have no job, underemployed, unsatisfied with current job, or just curious about future jobs, providing you below some helpful tips, tactics and techniques to build your own safety net that will protect you and advance your career.

Face it, the era of job security is over. No longer can anyone expect to work with one company for their career. However, if you develop skill security system you will be able roll with the volatility in the economy and be able to thrive while others struggle.

With this marking the 10 year anniversary of the penning of the Maintenance Crisis Song, we ask our supporters to help spread the word by sharing the Maintenance Crisis Song.

Just woke to a wonderful email this morning from Len Bradshaw, the editor of Australia's Asset Maintenance Management Journal. To help Aussies fight the Maintenance Crisis, Len is featuring the song and linking several of the genres in his online publication this month.

Most companies are not prepared to handle the mass exodus of pending retirements underway as the current boomer generation of workers age out. However some of the companies who are striving to develop their future pipeline of workers are encountering internal obstacles from their own staff.