U.S. Lags in Infrastructure, Skilled Workers

Just this morning, you used a lot of different gadgets just getting ready for work. You probably begrudgingly shut off the alarm on your smartphone. You took a shower. You got in your car to drive on roads to get to your office.

Smartphone, shower, car, roads… all of these things took skilled people to conceive, design and build; and when any of them start to falter, it takes another skilled person to fix it. Your appliance-assisted morning was brought to you by MANY skilled, technical people!

Alex Marshall focuses on skills related to infrastructure in his column, “For Infrastructure’s Sake, America Needs Skilled Workers.” Marshall writes that the United States lags behind other countries when it comes to sophisticated infrastructure in part because it lacks the workers to build or maintain it. Emphasis on the “maintain it.”

“You can’t just take this super sophisticated technology from over there, and bring it here and make it work,” said David Gunn, former head of Amtrak, in a decade-old interview with Marshall, but the sentiment still rings true. “Because, I mean, you have to have people who actually have a toolbox and can stand there and make it work.”

IndianaSkills.com exists to share with job seekers what jobs are in demand and what skills are necessary to do those jobs. Due to a “skills gap” in Indiana and nationwide, this information is critical to inform the emerging workforce.

“We will need skilled labor and management, and the production of both should be a national priority,” concluded Marshall.