After his organization published its latest analysis of Wisconsin’s workforce last week, Kurt Bauer is scared, noting he “can’t emphasize the seriousness of what this means enough.”
As part of its Future Wisconsin Project, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the WMC Foundation published “Wisconsin Workforce Competitiveness Evaluation” Friday, a report that identified six areas where the state can improve its workforce competitiveness, which is negatively impacted by Wisconsin’s stagnant population growth and an associated labor shortage. Bauer, WMC’s president and CEO since 2011, told the Milwaukee Business Journal Tuesday that all six areas of emphasis involve either talent attraction, talent retention or talent reintegration.
“When you need more people, you’ve got to do everything you can to keep people, but you’ve got to bring people in as well,” he said. “All three are important to address this solution on workforce going forward.”
Bauer said work began on the report during the summer of 2018, a few months after WMC retained Economic Leadership LLC, a North Carolina-based economic consulting firm led by Ted Abernathy, who co-authored the report. Retaining that firm to produce the report was part of an effort to have data drive state workforce policy as opposed to politics, Bauer said. Read the full story here.
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