ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis metro area has the nation’s highest percentage of small businesses struggling to hire workers and Missouri ranked first among states, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by SmartAsset.
The study found that 68.4% of small businesses in the St. Louis area that are actively hiring are having difficulty finding new employees. The report defined small businesses as those with fewer than 500 employees and did not delve into why certain regions and states struggled.
Art McCoy is the leader of STL.works, an initiative of the Regional Business Council. He said the findings didn’t surprise him, because there’s a lack of workers, especially young ones, who lack credentials for entry-level technology jobs in cybersecurity, geospatial and artificial intelligence.
“It’s essential to scale training programs that have apprenticeships that make a three- to four-year commitment to those individuals from the entry to the living wage positions of $55,000 to $60,000," he said.
The Pittsburgh metro ranked second at 67.7%, followed by Columbus, Ohio; Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, Texas; and Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, Arizona.
SmartAsset is a New York City-based financial technology company. Its website offers financial advice and connects consumers with financial advisers.
The study found that Missouri is the state with the highest percentage of small businesses reporting hiring difficulties, at 64%. That is about 10 percentage points higher than the national average that SmartAsset calculated.
Missouri has 542,519 small businesses with 1.2 million employees, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Read the full story on the St. Louis Business Journal website.
