By Dr. James Stapleton

CEO, Codefi Foundation on Rural Innovation

There is a job posting somewhere in your organization right now that has been open too long. You have raised the wage once, maybe twice. You have loosened the requirements. You have asked your best people to cover the gap “for now.” And somewhere in the back of your mind is a quiet assumption doing a lot of work: that this is a market condition, and market conditions pass. When things loosen up, the candidates will come back.

They will not. Not because your region is failing, and not because your pay is wrong, but because the assumption itself belongs to a labor market that no longer exists. The hardest thing I ask employers to accept — and the most useful — is that the shortage is not weather. It is arithmetic.

The arithmetic was settled years ago

A labor market can only draw from the people who exist. The U.S. total fertility rate has run below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman continuously since 2007, and in 2024 it fell to a record low of just under 1.6, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. That means the size of the workforce entering the 2030s was fixed years ago — it is not a forecast, it is a headcount of people already born. Meanwhile, the largest generation in our history is moving through retirement, and every year of the coming decade sends more experience out the door.

Federal projections describe the decade ahead in the same terms. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects labor force participation to fall from 62.6 percent in 2024 to 61.1 percent by 2034, with total employment growing just 3.1 percent over the decade — roughly a quarter of the prior decade's pace — a slowdown BLS attributes to demographic constraints as much as to economic demand. In its own analysis, the next decade's labor market will be defined less by workforce expansion than by competition for workers where demand outruns supply. Between those facts sits every open posting you have.

Demographics do not negotiate. There is no signing bonus, no recruiter, and no economic cycle that changes how many people were born in a given year. Employers who plan for the shortage to pass are planning around a number that cannot move.

In rural Missouri, the arithmetic compounds

The national trend is real everywhere, but it does not land everywhere equally. In a rural or mid-market region, it arrives with a multiplier. Young people leave for the metros and do not always return. When a position opens, there is no deep bench of nearby talent to draw from. And the standard metro playbook — widen the search radius, raise the offer, out-bid the firm across town — breaks down where there is no one across town to out-bid for. A hospital in St. Joseph, a manufacturer in the Bootheel, a clinic in Cape Girardeau: they are not competing badly for scarce workers. They are competing in a pool that is simply not refilling. The statewide numbers agree: by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Worker Shortage Index, Missouri has had roughly 87 available workers for every 100 open jobs — and that is the statewide average, before the rural multiplier is applied.

For many of our employers, the pool they are fishing in is the pool they already employ.

That sentence sounds like a diagnosis of defeat. It is actually the doorway to the answer — but only if you read it correctly. Before we get there, one more layer of the problem deserves naming, because most employers are feeling it without having words for it.

You do not have one shortage. You have two, stacked

The first shortage is people: not enough workers entering the labor force to replace those leaving it. You feel this when you cannot fill a posting. It is the shortage everyone talks about.

The second shortage is skills — and it lives inside the workforce you already have. The capabilities our industries need are now changing faster than any traditional training pipeline can refresh them. You feel this one when the person you did manage to hire, or the veteran you have relied on for fifteen years, needs a capability that did not exist when they were trained. The second shortage is quieter than the first, but it compounds it: even a fully staffed team can fall behind the work.

Missouri's hospitals — the state's most closely measured workforce — show both shortages operating at once. The Missouri Hospital Association's 2026 Workforce Report found that even as overall vacancy rates eased to 10.1 percent in 2025, turnover climbed to 23.7 percent, and the hardest positions to fill were precisely the specialized clinical roles that require significant training and licensure. “Workforce challenges are no longer temporary,” MHA Vice President of Workforce Development Jill Williams said of the findings — they are a strategic issue requiring long-term investment. A decade ago, that sentence would have described a hiring problem. Today it describes a training problem wearing a hiring problem's clothes.

Stack the two together and the standard responses reveal their limits. Recruiting harder addresses neither — in a region-sized labor pool, a hiring win for one employer is usually a vacancy for a neighbor, musical chairs with fewer chairs every round. Wage escalation, past a point, moves workers around the region without adding a single one to it. And waiting — the most common strategy of all — concedes both shortages while they deepen.

What remains when hiring is off the table

Follow the arithmetic to its conclusion and only one lever is left standing: if you cannot add workers, you must raise what each existing worker can accomplish. Not by asking people to do more with less — that is how regions burn out the workforce they can least afford to lose, and it makes both shortages worse. The real version of the lever is giving the people you already employ tools that multiply what their training and judgment make them uniquely able to do, so more of their day goes to the work only they can do and less to everything else.

For a metro employer, investing in the incumbent workforce is one strategy among several. For rural and mid-market Missouri, it is the only move on the board — which is exactly why it deserves to be played better here than anywhere else. And the board is tilting: MERIC, the state's labor market research center, projects that Missouri's fastest-growing occupational groups over the coming decade are computer and mathematical occupations, healthcare support, and healthcare practitioners — demand concentrating exactly where the skills gap is already sharpest.

For most of my career, there was an honest objection to this conclusion: the tools that delivered real productivity gains required scarce technical specialists to operate — precisely the workers a labor-short region cannot recruit. The lever existed; the hands to pull it did not. That objection died quietly over the last three years, and what replaced it is the single most important development in workforce economics in a generation. That is the next post in this series.

What an employer can do this quarter

You do not need to wait for the series to finish. If the posting that opened this essay sounds familiar, the practical first step is an audit question: how much of your best people's time goes to work that does not require their training? That gap — between what your workforce is qualified to do and what it actually spends its days doing — is where the productivity lever attaches, and it is where our training programs begin. Codefi works with Missouri employers in any industry to build AI capability in the teams they already have, from AI literacy through a credential earned on the job, in collaboration with local and regional partners across the state. Start the conversation at codefiworks.com/ai-training.

The shortage is structural. That is the bad news, and it is also the last piece of bad news in this series. Everything that follows is about the answer.

Learn fast. Build right. Gain traction.