Time or Tenure

By Matthew Mohr

Learning about the people who make our region strong and a continued success is very interesting. Reading about the young people highlighted in this issue of Prairie Business is enlightening.

In addition to some great young people and a robust economy, we are fortunate in a lot of ways to be living in this region.

Business owners continue to struggle to find qualified employees for many job openings, yet we have unemployed and under-employed people.

matthew mohr

When speaking about under-employed, we generally mean people are working jobs that their education or experience exceeds its job duties; indicating they are qualified for better paying or higher-level positions.

Assessing the level of under employment is not an easy task. If a survey was taken, many people would claim they are underpaid and overqualified for the work they perform.

Recently, I attended a meeting that addressed regional hiring and employee attitudes. Those of us considered “old school” value years of service and the understanding of how a business functions.

Part of the younger worker attitude revolves around how many jobs one has had and what is considered purely monetary motivation. As an “old schooler,” I am impressed with an organization that has long-term employees. The more people who have been with an employer for eight or more years, indicates success. A young person who has had eight jobs in five years considers themselves a success.

Such an attitude in today’s employment environment is understandable as younger employees tend to be able to secure higher pay with each change of employer; so after the job hopping, where success is measured by the size of your paycheck, upon achieving the eighth job, one must be getting high pay! If our regional job market slows down and people can’t jump from job to job for more pay, we will see a fast change in attitude.

As job hoppers get older, their accumulated savings will most likely fall far short of their desired lifestyle, leading to years of dissatisfaction post employment, and these individual’s retirement years will fall very short of their expectations.

The only answer to the employment-wage push dilemma is for a business to continually assess its pay rates and work hard to be competitive enough to keep, as well as attract, employees while satisfying customers.