Gather a group of business leaders together and ask them about their top challenges. Undoubtedly, attracting, retaining, and developing a talented workforce will be a leading topic of the conversation. After all, no matter how great your product or service is, without great people, any organization will struggle to succeed.
New Hampshire has long benefited from having one of the highest quality workforces in the nation. Overall, our state’s workforce is recognized for being well trained, highly educated, and experienced. Those attributes, combined with NH’s favorable business climate and high quality of life, form the basis of a competitive advantage that has fueled economic growth across the Granite State for decades.
This competitive advantage is slowly eroding, as regional and national demographic trends play out and increasing numbers of NH’s workers reach their retirement years. This trend is not exclusive to NH, but we should be concerned with how our demographics stack up with our neighbors and nationally. The most compelling data point that encapsulates this trend is 28% of NH’s current workforce is 55 years or older, the highest percentage of any state in the country. This means that in addition to the list of positive attributes of the state’s workforce listed earlier, we must also add “oldest in the U.S.” as well. This fact in and of itself is not a weakness and reinforces the high-levels of experience, training, and educational attainment of our current workforce. It is, however, a call to action and the defining challenge to our state’s economic competitiveness in the years and decades ahead.
Sustainably addressing this challenge will take a variety of solutions, initiatives, and programs aligned under a comprehensive state talent and workforce growth strategy that underscores what our future job growth should look like. Underpinning this strategy are continued efforts to improve the ability for workers to relocate to and put down roots in NH. Policy reform efforts at the statehouse to increase the supply and lower the costs of housing and childcare are critical, and the progress made over the last few years is encouraging. That work must continue for the foreseeable future.
The continued growth of programs and initiatives to provide career pathways and workforce training programs is also encouraging and foundational to our state meeting this defining challenge. From Bring Back the Trades, the John Olson Center Advanced Manufacturing Center at the University of NH, the work of Stay Work Play NH, as well as our colleges and universities, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of efforts at the local and regional levels underway to connect students and workers with businesses.
As we move forward, new workforce approaches and strategies are needed. First, let’s resource and map all the workforce training programs and efforts across the state. Second, using that information, we need to assess what programs are having the greatest impact and can be scaled statewide. The scope and scale of the workforce challenge facing NH will require a greater level of statewide coordination than we are accustomed to. Finally, we need to forecast what industries are poised for growth, what jobs will be produced, and what education and skills will be needed for workers to fill those roles. This will be one of the most challenging aspects of this work as technological advances in areas like artificial intelligence are rapidly reshaping how we do business and our everyday lives.
The stakes could not be higher for the future of NH’s economy, and the work ahead will be complex and challenging. I’m optimistic we are on the right path. The BIA is working with a variety of statewide institutions on developing and advancing a comprehensive strategy to tackle this issue. Our state’s greatest resource is its citizens and by growing that resource, prosperity will follow.
Michael Skelton is president and CEO of the Business & Industry Association of NH, the statewide chamber of commerce that advocates for business-friendly public policy. For more information, visit BIAofNH.com.
