Got skills?

When new immigrants arrived, "you could find someone [on staff] who spoke their language and give them instructions for their entire career in about an hour," Fowler says. "I don't mean to demean it, because learning a machine like this was really an art. But you didn't need complex mathematical and linguistic skills to make a union wage and put your kids through college."

The company "got out of the stone age" in 1973, he says, installing faster and more complicated machines. Employees needed more training, and their mistakes got costlier. If something is set up improperly, "you can make enough bad paper in an eight-hour shift to stretch from here to Boston and back again," Fowler says.

As job requirements changed, he was determined not to leave any employees behind. For seven years, an in-house teacher offered English and math classes on company time. Now, Hampden reimburses for academic courses that employees opt to take on their own.

Making his way through the plant's ground floor, Fowler talks over the rhythmic whir of a giant laminator about how he wanted to require an associate's degree for the people who operate it. The union blocked that move, but some of the operators have earned their degrees anyway. On a nearby machine, two employees pace back and forth, scrutinizing rolls of gold paper and periodically reaching a finger up to an attached touch-screen computer.

Fowler looks beyond his own company, too. He participates in local workforce-development initiatives and advocates for everything from education reform to more government funding for training. He worries about all the people still being left behind. One day a young Latino came in and asked the receptionist if he could take an application home. She asked him to fill it out in an adjacent room, because the company uses the form as a literacy screen. When he came out, two hours later, he left it with her and scurried out. He had written only his name. Fowler heard the story when he happened by the receptionist's desk and noticed she had been crying.

Such skills gaps are showing up nationwide - and at all levels of hiring and employment. About 60 percent of employers test job applicants in some form, and 38 percent are deficient in basic reading and math, according to the American Management Association. At the management level, the AMA also reports shortcomings in conceptual skills, communication, and problem solving.

That's of particular concern, because by 2013, the EPF report says, nearly 40 percent of US jobs will be professional or managerial.

"When I speak to audiences of senior executives, I ask how many companies are experiencing difficulty right now in filling critical positions, and between 70 and 80 percent of the hands go up," says Roger Herman, lead author of "Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People" and CEO of the Herman Group consulting firm in Greensboro, N.C.

But with some executives struggling to keep their companies afloat in a rocky economy, it's not easy to get them to think strategically about the future workforce crunch.

Training and development of employees are often the first areas to be cut, and companies rarely measure how that might be hurting their bottom line, according to a recent study by Accenture, a New York consulting firm.

It's also difficult to project more than a few years ahead. No one knows for sure if technological advances will create more jobs than they make obsolete. And, of course, if the economy unexpectedly nosedives, a labor shortage won't be the problem.

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