Idaho’s tight labor market is expected to continue, state Department of Labor officials told lawmakers today, with the labor force growing by 24 percent from 2000 to 2016, while the population grew by 35 percent. But the population gains are projected to come in rural areas and among people over age 65. By 2024, Idaho’s labor force is expected to have a gap of roughly 49,000 jobs that the population can’t or isn’t qualified to fill.

Ken Edmunds, department director, said, “We have this pool of 30,000 people unemployed, 15,000 jobs that aren’t filled, and they do not match. The challenge we face … we’re not making the progress we need to on getting people oriented to where they need to be.”

Edmunds said he met yesterday with students at Wallace High School, and asked them about their future plans. Many anticipated getting high-paying mining jobs like their older relatives, he said, which wouldn’t require more training beyond high school. But Edmunds said as technology advances, those jobs will disappear. “The world is changing,” Edmunds said he told the students. “The jobs that your parents have today will not exist in any form in the future. … It all comes back to how we’re training our people. We’re not moving rapidly enough. We’re not instructing our parents and our students rapidly enough on how the world is changing.”