After reading about the critical teacher shortages, I’m wondering what’s happening in other fields. I suspect many other workplaces are facing serious problems as well. What’s happening in yours?
PA rental business is finally getting back on its feet with events being performed in front of live audience. On the other hand, staff shortages exist here, too, since people had to shift to other lines of work during the Covid crisis. Plus, getting spare parts has become increasingly problematic.
Hopefully, everything will soon fall into place!
Retail worker here, in the grocery area.
Staff shortages aren’t quite as bad, although we still have a problem holding onto folks. The good news is that I’m earning about $3 more an hour than I was two years ago for the exact same job.
The supply chain issues are not as bad as they were at the peak of problems but we still have problems, many of which are not predictable. Sometimes we can’t order something. Sometimes we order it and it just never arrives. Sometimes a partial order arrives. Sometimes it arrives late which, in the case of perishables, is worse than not at all because now we have a mess to clean up.
Although most customers have some understanding of these problems and while they may not be happy they don’t take it out on the staff there are exceptions. There are a certain number of customers who are, to be blunt, belligerent assholes. These have always existed, but combined with a sense of self-entitlement it can get quite toxic. While belligerent assholes come in all shapes, genders, and colors these days if we see an elderly White man in a red hat approaching the complaint line we really, really cringe inside.
Nope. I’m a creative, my stock-in-trade is pixels on a screen, and they’re basically infinite and don’t depend on supply chains and such.
The website I write for is constantly trying (and mostly failing) to bring on new writers*, but what that means in a practical sense is very little. Just less content being produced.
*If you’ve been published online and are looking for a new gig and/or a side hustle, DM me.
I work in higher education. We’ve had people retiring in droves (I will be doing that myself shortly) and replacing them has been more difficult. I work an odd schedule and right now the PTB at my workplace are trying to figure out what to do about that since they think it will be difficult to get a replacement willing to work my schedule.
I’m an incident manager on contract to the USPS, and things have really, really, really calmed down from where they were a year or two ago. Biggest problem these days is that Zoom isn’t being as reliable as they’d like it to be, and somehow that’s our problem, not Zoom’s.
The usual crisis time is Thanksgiving to New Year’s, when everything’s running at peak capacity. Once we went on quarantine in March 2020 and everybody in the country started ordering online, we operated at that max capacity for almost a year. When things broke, things got real fun.
I’m in advertising. We are still having big issues with employee turnover (including people leaving the industry entirely), and trying to backfill. Most of our clients are seeing much the same thing, unfortunately.
We do a lot of direct mail for some clients, and that has been a nightmare this year, due to shortages of paper stock. There are some types of stock that simply cannot be sourced at all right now. Our agency is one of the biggest printers of direct mail pieces in the U.S., and so, we have massive contracts with paper suppliers for various paper stocks – and even we are facing long lead times and increased costs, if we can get the paper at all.
We’ve had a terrible time getting suitable candidates for our Shipping/Receiving role. Like dozens of people have come and gone, both being asked to not come back as well as them just quitting. Too bad, some of them were pretty good.
We went from 6 full time Sales staff to two in the last 12 months. In fact, I was surprised to learn just this morning that one rep won’t be returning, desk cleaned out. I work for the Sales boss in a non-sales role and he tells me the candidates are very poor. We sell measuring instruments and it’s pretty technical. Apparently one guy that applied had sold commercial baked goods.
I fly chartered jets, and right now companies can’t find enough pilots. But even if they could, the logjam is training slots. The simulators are booked up with a long backlog. One of my colleagues speculated that the current situation could last a few years.
I work for a federal contractor, specializing in military medicine. We’re actively hiring. I regularly see people coming through on interviews. Have a new person starting in a couple of weeks, another later in the year.
University prof and it is really difficult to get people to fill staff positions: department managers, advisors, clerical. The fall will be interesting as we face classrooms with 250 disease vectors sitting in front of us, or worse, dynamic and robust seminars in rooms where the seating limits are constantly redesigned by the same people who recalculate the economy class seating for airlines. Also, many classroom windows have been sealed up. The rumour is it was done to prevent suicides, but more likely it was done to control heating costs. Either way, the administration’s efforts to “reduce faculty complement” may blossom if we get a major Covid wave!
My commute sometimes has me drive past O’hare Airport and there is a billboard ad seeking to recruit pilots. It’s one of those video ones so I don’t see that ad everytime I pass by and can’t remember the name of the airline (I didn’t recognize it) but things must have become quite bad for that to make sense. There must be very few qualified people that see it at all. It does say ‘Upgrade to Captain!’
Santa‽
We’re having a hard time with staffing - part of it is, frankly, that management and/or the owners don’t want to increase starting wages.
We’re having some issues with getting our comp!imentary toiletries on a timely basis.
In the airline world, it’s the smaller regional carriers that have the staffing problem. Major airlines will eventually be fine, although they also suffer from the simulator logjam. But getting pilots in at the “minor league” level is tough. Been there, done that and although I know conditions and pay are better now, I wouldn’t want to do it again.
Coincidentally, I was just out walking and saw a billboard that read, “Become a nurse - no wait list!”
This is what I have to deal with:
Availability
Stock: 0
Notify me when product is in stock.
You can still purchase this product for backorder.
On Order: 7
Factory Lead-Time: 58 Weeks
Long lead time reported on this product.
I’m a teacher. The Ur-example. And I will be retiring not soon enough.
We started losing a lot of people at my company when we came back to the office last October, but we’re not losing so many as management finally figured out which way the wind was blowing as is allowing most employees to work from home at least 4 days a week. Something like 70% of the company is remote now.
The HR department typically has a low turnover rate, but that hasn’t been true since December. We lost people in compensation, benefits, administration, and recruiting many of whom had been with the company for almost two decades. For the most part, they left for greener pastures where the pay was better and they could work from home full time. There were more serious problems in recruiting, and they pretty much left in mass protest and we don’t have a single recruiter who has been with the company for more than 5-6 months.
Things seem to be reaching an equilibrium at least.
I placed a order at Mouser for some radio modems in May. They don’t expect them to ship until July 2023.
I work in computer component hardware sourcing. The default now is to quote 52 weeks, and then the supplier starts to try to decrease that lead time AFTER they get a PO. It’s usually not that bad but no where near the 4-12 week pre-covd lead time for most components.