The search for skills has been a daunting task for U.S. companies trying to find the right person to fill well paying and highly skilled jobs.
Despite high unemployment rates, many employers report they’re struggling in the job matching process, frequently complaining that there’s a mismatch between the available domestic workforce and the skills they are demanding.
As a result, companies are having to turn to an international pool of high-skilled workers to find the specialized skills they need because the geographical distribution of skills is so uneven throughout the world. More than half (56 percent) of the world’s engineering bachelor’s degrees are earned in Asia, with another 17 percent in Europe, and just 4 percent in the United States according to the National Science Foundation. Even smaller Asian nations outpace the United States with the combined natural sciences and engineering degrees earned in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan exceeding the United States, despite their collective size being much smaller.
The demand for these highly technical skills is high in the United States, and companies must be willing to consider a range of options for recruiting these skills from abroad. Immigration policy can be critical to the flow of skills entering the United States…
via Is America falling behind in the skilled worker race? – Global Public Square – CNN.com Blogs.
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