‘There’s a war for people’: strong jobs market belies a shortage of skilled workers

An aging population has left 83% of businesses fighting to find workers with the right skills, a problem that is slated to worsen

For someone who makes “job-killing robots,” Tony Nighswander has an ironic problem. The US jobs market has not been this hot for 50 years and the president of APT Manufacturing Solutions, an Ohio-based company that specializes in robotic equipment, can’t find enough workers.

With American unemployment at lows last seen around the time of the first lunar landing, his clients are turning to APT and its robots to fill the positions they can’t find people for. But he doesn’t dare take on more salespeople because he’s not sure he can hire enough workers to get the robots running.

“Robots killing jobs, that’s a myth. Nine out of 10 times when we put in robots, they increase production but they don’t take away people,” says Nighswander. And right now “there’s a war for people”, he says as he shows off APT’s shiny, air-conditioned facility in Hicksville, a rural village set in flat farmland on the edge of Indiana.