Workforce woes

Age of the Geek Column: Iowa is currently suffering from a 2.4% unemployment rate.
Yes, suffering. In spite of what so-called "common sense" might tell you, low unemployment is just as bad for an economy as high unemployment. It turns out that it's really hard to staff your business, much less expand it, when there's nobody around to hire.
I'm seeing it everywhere I go lately. Schools need teachers, cities need police officers, health care facilities need nurses. Even our own company is in need of at least two full-time reporters.
Not long ago I was talking with somebody and we both had to laugh as we simultaneously asked each other to keep any eye out for potential candidates for our respective open positions. Intellectually I'd known that the worker shortage was getting rough, but that's when it really hit me what a problem it has become.
Of course the Republican controlled state legislature is hot on the case. Not to resolve the issue, but to use it as an excuse to save state dollars by making life just a little harder for poor people. Namely by pushing the idea of work requirements for people on Medicaid, because Medicaid recipients haven't dealt with enough hassle from the legislature in recent years.
Now, it's not unreasonable to want to make sure that the people who can work are working before we subsidize them. However, this mindset tends to overlook the fact that people are not infinitely adaptable pieces of clay.
Life is not a sim game where you can assign any particular job to a random NPC. Again, "common sense" might dictate that if there is somebody not working and somebody else with a job opening, these two issues should naturally resolve each other. Reality, however, begs to differ.
Is anybody under the impression that there is an untapped pool of qualified nurses and teachers hiding out on the government dole? Who thinks that disability audits are going to help short-staffed law enforcement agencies fill their vacant positions?
It doesn't matter how many people there are out-of-work if none of them are capable of doing the job you're hiring for and it doesn't matter how many jobs are available if you're not qualified to do them.
Workforce training programs can help, but that's a temporary solution at best and largely meant for entry level positions with low skill barriers to entry. Job openings that require more specialized training are much more difficult to fill. First you need to find somebody capable of doing it, then you need to convince them to move to where the job is for the pay you're capable of offering. It's not an easy proposition.
For many of these open positions in rural Iowa, communities are becoming resigned to the reality that the days of people living out their careers in one place are over. Instead, these communities are becoming training grounds for young professionals looking to get a little bit of experience before moving on to bigger and better opportunities.
If we're lucky, they'll only move to a larger city within the state borders. Sure, it'll increase the divide between rural Iowa and metro Iowa, but at least they'll be paying state taxes.
Regardless of where they go, this puts rural Iowa in a constant cycle of hiring and training new people, only to see them leave and force the process to start over again.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue.
Of the many challenges our rural areas face, none is greater than our declining population, particularly the mass exodus of our best and brightest. As the new legislative session starts this week, no bill should be considered without somebody asking, "Will this encourage people to stay in/move to Iowa?"
If Iowa is to have a successful future, particularly rural Iowa, we need to either attract the professionals we need or keep the ones we grow. Preferably both.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and would like some new co-workers.