How to Rethink Talent Acquisition to Close Critical Workforce Gaps
Eric Bunton, AWP Safety’s vice president of Talent Acquisition, was recently featured in an article on HR.com, where he shared his perspective on how the talent acquisition landscape is changing. Eric explains how the industry is rethinking what “job-ready” really means, and the growing shift among employers who still value formal education, but no longer see it as a sufficient—or scalable—proxy for capability.
Four-Year Degrees and Where they matter most
A four-year degree remains essential in regulated and credentialed professions, as well as in leadership or specialist roles that require deep theoretical knowledge and standardized qualifications.
However, job readiness now depends more on practical skills in many fields, including frontline operations, sales, technology-adjacent roles, and other skilled positions where performance, adaptability, and reliability hold the same value, if not more, than academic credentials.
It’s more important for employers to believe candidates can contribute from day one, adapt to change, and collaborate effectively. This shift recognizes that a degree does not guarantee job readiness, nor does its absence indicate a lack of qualification. The future of hiring emphasizes demonstrated capability, adaptability, and impact, rather than standing on credentials alone.
Closing the Skills Gap in Critical Industries
The largest gaps between skills demand and available talent are found in skilled trades and construction, AI and data-driven business skills, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare. Construction firms struggle to fill both field and salaried positions, which can lead to project delays caused by personnel and recruiting challenges.
Over time, deeper issues arise, such as limited training capacity, onboarding readiness, transportation, and retention. Currently, the most severe shortages are among electricians, CDL drivers, equipment operators, project supervisors, and safety-critical field roles.
The AI and data gap extends beyond data scientists and machine learning engineers, and is now a relevant skill required in more positions. There is now a broader need for baseline AI and data fluency across most roles; a smaller group of deep specialists is still necessary, as well.
Cybersecurity continues to face structural shortages, especially in cloud and AI-related security, where the main challenge is finding the right mix of skills and job readiness. Advanced manufacturing is experiencing similar shortages in the areas of industrial maintenance, automation and controls, quality, CNC, and plant leadership roles that require digital systems expertise. In healthcare, shortages are most acute in bedside nursing, behavioral health, specialty care, and rural access roles.
Closing these gaps really comes down to changing how we think about talent; how we define it, build it, and move it around inside organizations. Employers have to move past using degrees as a litmus test for readiness and start validating skills directly, with roles clearly defined by the capabilities that actually matter.
That means investing in repeatable pathways like apprenticeships, paid training, and earn-and-learn programs instead of relying on one-off hiring pushes and using internal mobility as the main way people reskill and grow by mapping realistic next steps and adjacent skills.
It also means paying much more attention to the frontline experience. In many cases, the gap is made worse by avoidable attrition driven by unstable schedules, transportation or childcare challenges, uneven supervision, and slow ramp-up times. On top of that, AI skills need to be built intentionally and in layers; giving everyone a baseline level of AI literacy, developing practitioner skills for people who use these tools day to day, and reserving deep specialist expertise for engineering, security, and governance roles.
Addressing H-1B Visa Constraints
The U.S. can narrow the skills gap materially even with ongoing H-1B constraints, but it won’t fully solve it through the education system alone without a redesign that blends skills-first hiring, stronger school-to-work pathways, and clearer employer accountability; which needs to be supported by smarter immigration.
The most important shift is to make skills the “unit of currency,” not degrees or seat time. By moving to skills-based job architectures and requiring evidence of competence through work samples, validated assessments, and structured interviews (treating degrees as one pathway rather than the default proxy for readiness).
In parallel, we need to rebuild the “middle layer” between school and work by scaling apprenticeships and earn-and-learn models beyond the trades into tech, analytics, operations, and healthcare support roles, and by expanding short-cycle, stackable credentials that are explicitly tied to real jobs and wage progression.
Just as critically, employers must realize the importance of internal talent creation, not just talent consumption. If every company tries to “buy” the same scarce skills and candidates, the gap never closes. That means funding training like capex: multi-year, measurable, and tightly linked to jobs; rewarding managers for internal mobility and faster time-to-proficiency; and building “adjacent skills” pathways that move people laterally into higher-demand roles.
Immigration should then be modernized as an accelerator rather than a crutch: prioritize truly acute shortage skills where domestic pipelines are slow, reduce friction for graduates in critical fields while maintaining worker protections, and use selection mechanisms to better match national needs.
Finally, we must fix the data layer with real-time workforce intelligence, so programs, training investment, and public funding align with current regional demand signals instead of lagging indicators.
Evolving AWP Safety’s Talent ACquisition STrategy
Our talent acquisition strategy for 2026 is to fundamentally shift TA from a transactional hiring function into a workforce engine – one designed for scale, speed, safety, and sustained labor access in an increasingly constrained market.
This is not about incremental improvement; 2026 is about building structural advantage. We will hire for capability rather than credentials, design the TA engine around the frontline candidate journey, and re-architect corporate and professional roles around skills instead of titles so that roles are defined by what success requires, not by inherited job descriptions.
To make this work, at AWP Safety we’ll rethink recruiter roles and capacity so the team is set up to operate in a faster, more skills-based environment, without ever compromising on safety, compliance, or quality as we scale. We’ll also use data as an active decision tool, helping us make real-time choices about workforce planning, priorities, and trade-offs. Our goal is to turn talent acquisition into a real competitive advantage, not just a support function in the background of our business.
To learn more about careers with AWP Safety, and to look for new job opportunities, visit AWP Safety Careers.
