Chicago Exec-MBA Germana Paterlini noticed his passage from Ben Bernanke's Congressional testimony this week (emphasis added):
The rate of resource utilization is high, as can be seen in rates of capacity utilization above their long-term average and, most evidently, in the tightness of the labor market. Indeed, anecdotal reports suggest that businesses are having difficulty recruiting well-qualified workers in certain occupations.
Germana's company, Certusoft, is apparently one of these businesses. Certusoft is a software company, and you might think that this sort of high-skill enterprise is not exactly representative. But the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Turnover Survey (JOLTS) suggests the phenomenon is fairly widespread. Job openings -- or unfilled positions -- have been rising steadily for about three years and, after flattening out in the first half of 2006, the growth of job vacancies accelerated in the latter part of the year:
This pattern even emerges in manufacturing, a sector in which net job creation continues on in negative territory:
To be sure, a combination of rising job openings and no job growth does not prove that there is a skill-match problem restraining employment growth (resulting in labor-market "tightness" even though the pace of job expansion appears modest). But it does make you think.