The Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board (TRWIB) has issued a report on the aging of the region’s labor pool warning of a future shortage of workers. The report finds the region will be faced with a high number of retirements in the future and not enough qualified younger workers to fill critical jobs in key sectors like manufacturing, education, health care, and the trades.
The Pittsburgh region’s workforce is aging faster than the rest of the country, according to Stefani Pashman, the Workforce Investment Board’s CEO. "If all workers currently over 55 were to retire over the next decade, we would need to find replacements for almost a quarter of a million jobs. And in the last ten years alone, we have lost over 100,000 workers between the ages of 25 to 44, which is a pretty significant statistic.
The report recommends strategies for meeting the workforce challenge, which include an expanding role for career and technical centers to get youth into the pipeline, ways to keep aging workers on the job longer, and the transfer of skills and knowledge from older workers to younger workers.
