Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Single mothers may fill future workforce shortage
By Steve Bailey
Advance-Titan (U. Wisconsin-Oshkosh)
12/29/2006

(U-WIRE) OSHKOSH, Wis. — Research done for the Division of Lifelong Learning and Community Engagement at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh has found a segment of the American population capable of filling jobs when baby boomers retire.

William McConkey, director of marketing and community relations for the LLCE, thinks that divorced women and single mothers of children under 18 could be part of the solution.

"The aging of the workforce is going to mean a large number of vacancies in the present, but especially the near future," McConkey said. "This is going to create some shortages in the workforce."

McConkey said northeast Wisconsin companies, like Mercury Marine, are concerned with succession planning. Mercury Marine is currently running programs to train and educate workers on all levels because of the need for those people to move up in the company.

"What I am suggesting is that there are some 70,000-plus people in 16 northeast Wisconsin counties," McConkey said. "If we identify them and if we attempted an intervention program of some kind to improve their educational opportunities and support for their educational activities, parents would do better, their children would do better and the workforce would then have a better educated population."

Usually McConkey's research is only seen internally at Oshkosh, however, members of Christine Anne Center, Boys and Girls Club, Winnebago County Literacy Council, Fox Valley Technical College, Moraine Park Technical College, UW-Extension and United Way received the reports about single mothers and the aging workforce to attract the public's attention.

United Way Executive Director Susan Panek said she is a member of a group, constructed of members of the aforementioned groups, that is unnamed, but she referred to it as the "single mother taskforce."

Panek said the group is working on a presentation about the need to educate mothers in the community.

"(McKonkey) is making the assumption that these jobs are going to be there and that the women can take over these jobs," Panek said. "If it is indeed true that we're going to have a workforce shortage based on the boomers retiring, then now is a good time to begin working with the single moms to get them prepared to take on these roles."

Panek mentioned that there is also the possibility that some baby boomers may have to continue working past retirement, which is also mentioned within McConkey's research. However, she said the group still thinks the issue needs to be addressed soon.

"The problem is not the lack of educational opportunities," McConkey said. "The problem is the lack of educational opportunities that the single mothers are aware of and can readily take advantage of. They are going to need scholarships and support."

Edward Gordon's book "The 2010 Meltdown" was one of McConkey's resources. About 70 million baby boomers will exit the workforce over the next 18 years, with only 40 million workers coming in, according to the book.

"The workforce is ill prepared for the future," McConkey said. "We are losing far too many workers. The world is changing in such a pace that the workers are ill prepared to do the jobs that they're asked to do. There is some obvious growth every year in demand for talented people."

Within McConkey's research report titled "The 2010 Meltdown: Veterans, Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers Reach Retirement Age," he found that 80 percent of all senior executives and about 70 percent of all middle managers in the U.S. federal government are eligible for retirement during the current administration's term in office, 50 percent of the federal government workforce is eligible for retirement now, and one million college professors and teachers will soon be eligible for retirement.

McConkey spent about one month on each report and received help from JoLynn Rakow and Aryn Walters. It was only during his research McConkey started to see the connection between the two separate topics.

JoLynn Rakow, currently an editorial assistant for university relations, was employed for McConkey as his marketing & program assistant. She did some research about single mothers and edited, formatted and inserted the text into the reports.

Rakow was also the project manager at the single mothers meeting.

"In the meetings we brainstormed ideas on how to educate single mothers systematically with the resources we currently have available, and how to obtain more funding to help them," Rakow wrote in an e-mail response. "For example, many single mothers go to the Christine Ann center. Well, sometimes they do not even know how to read. With this system, the center could send them to the Literacy Council for tutoring and then contact Fox Valley Tech for introductory classes to learn more basic skills. The goal was to create a unified system to educate the single mothers."

Oshkosh's Center for New Learning currently offers courses that could benefit single mothers. The release of McConkey's research was not meant to suggest offering new courses on campus, but to show the public how a segment of Wisconsin's population could potentially help the aging workforce problem.

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