Be prepared.  A scouts motto but it certainly can be applied to today’s job market.  If you haven’t noticed, there has been an increase in opportunities out there in the engineering & manufacturing sectors but it’s not going to slow down anytime soon.  So if you need or are thinking about bringing in top talent, the time is now!

Back in March 2020, the job market was nuts.  It was simple.  There was a 12-18 month lead up to that point where it was becoming harder and harder to find good people.  Hard to find top talent.  COVID has just hidden this demand.  First off, since around September 2020, companies had their COVID policies in place and were becoming more familiar with the new normal and hiring started back up.  As you can imagine, there was not a lot of hiring from March to June-July of 2020.  The increase in roles from last September to now has been a steady increase with a slight drop during the lockdown at the start of 2021.  Here are a couple of the other signs of why you need to jump on hiring now:

Retirements.  Who was going to retire during the pandemic?  A lot of upcoming retirements were pushed off if they had the choice.  With all the uncertainty, why not take a paycheck to, in some cases, work from home.  In other cases, it was still better to push off retiring to get the stability of a paycheck and retiring once the pandemic was over.  So, over the next 6-12 months, I bet you we will see an uptick in retirements in comparison to previous years in the same time period.

COVID layoffs/restructuring.  This is the obvious one, there was a lot of layoffs and restructuring over the last 12-18 months and companies are now starting to fill those gaps with new or “upgraded” talent.  With light at the end of the tunnel, hiring budgets have been “released” and companies are now starting to fill the gaps left from layoffs that happened in 2020 as the revenue numbers rise.

Musical chairs.  The often forgotten aspect of when the job market picks up.  All of the available roles, a high majority of them are filled with talent coming from other companies.  This snowballs the already tough market in finding talent as companies scramble to then backfill people who have left.

So, you take the already crazy job market before the pandemic hit, the pushed off retirements and all of the layoffs/restructuring that happened during 2020, then add the musical chair effect and you have quite the upcoming rollercoaster ride of a job market.  Great if you are looking for that next step in your career, not so great if you’re looking to add to your team!