‘Sobering results’ of employer survey need rapid response

With what the lead researcher calls “sobering results,” a survey of employer needs in Miami-Dade unveiled last week found that only 4% are satisfied with job skills of their candidates, and small employers especially appear adrift in the labor market.

Findings are logical if painful: Miami’s business environment has changed rapidly. Behind our glitz, employers reel from the lingering impacts of covid, the changes to remote work, the emergence of AI, the boom of fintech, a rising cost of living far above national average, unemployment far below anywhere else, and the impacts of all of these on the business environment and local economy. 

Given the rapid changes, the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce was timely in the education and workforce development survey it unveiled at its annual economic summit. The survey – which every local employer and civic leader should read – was run by Florida International University’s urban think tank, the Jorge M. Pérez Metropolitan Center, with a backdrop of how higher education can help fill the county’s employment gap.  

The findings highlighted the gulf in hiring needs between large and small employers, chamber CEO Alfred Sanchez noted after the survey’s presentation to an audience heavily weighted to bankers. Small employers are a growing majority of Miami enterprises, he noted, yet small businesses are less prepared to handle workforce changes and they say they can’t envision their future employee skill needs, instead depending on universities to graduate those they need though they can’t articulate what those needs might be.

“We want to try to lean into small business and try to help them understand what they need for the workforce,” Mr. Sanchez said, bringing the businesses together with universities and civic organizations that might help them navigate the turbulent employment waters.

That’s an admirable and vital goal, though getting small business operators together in an organized way is like herding cats. As the survey shows, small businesses are often so short of key people that overworked owners can’t find time to seek ways to break that cycle.

Among survey findings presented by principal investigator Maria Ilcheva is that more than 70% of employers say a lack of qualified job candidates is a challenge to recruiting workers and 55% noted an increase in resignations in the last two years. More than half of those who saw increased resignations cited that they had a significant impact on their businesses.

But when they go to fill those or other jobs, 83% of employers say they are challenged to offer a competitive salary to newcomers. “There is a mismatch between candidate expectations and employer offerings,” Ms. Ilcheva said.

The crunch is evident: too few qualified candidates as openings increase and the job market today is so tight at 1.6% unemployment, lowest in the US, that employers must stretch to pay enough to fill jobs even if the candidates aren’t fully qualified. That’s self-reported by employers, so there is a potential bias in the survey, but it’s the world in which businesses say they operate, and they act based on those perceptions.

More small employers than large say they are unprepared or unsure how to handle the changing landscaping of the local workforce, with lack of preparedness increasing as business sizes shrink.

When asked why workers leave them, 57% of employers cited the cost of living, again with the smaller businesses most likely to be impacted. Another big reason: 28% cited new opportunities outside of South Florida. 

Ms. Ilcheva pointed to workers finding career opportunities outside of the region, citing the 134,382 excess of people moving from Miami over people moving to Miami from elsewhere in the nation between 2020 and 2023 that this column reported earlier last week. “Can we keep them here as employers?” she asked.

That’s the question to focus on: retention of the best. 

Miami has historically had a brain drain as workers left for higher pay and greater growth opportunities. In those days, our average salary was well below national levels, but those who left were always exceeded by people who wanted to move to Miami for other reasons.

Now that we exceed national urban average wages – though only by $4 a week – and new financial and tech industries have created far more job opportunities, our worker outflow to the rest of the nation exceeds the inflow and our population is marginally decreasing.

We have good talent coming out of our colleges and universities, arguably better than ever, yet when employees leave the county our businesses report severe problems replacing them with qualified people.

That is the challenge for the chamber and other civic organizations that in Mr. Sanchez’s vision will work with universities and smaller employers, who are by far the hardest hit, to seek new links between businesses and higher education to fill the employment gap between expectations and realities.

It can’t begin soon enough.