I think I met with you with Calla Farn from McCain's talking about some of these issues a couple of months ago, and they're really top of mind for us.
There are two kinds of challenges going on at the same time. A decreasing percentage of our population is in the workforce, and that is going to accelerate substantially over the next five years. We're already seeing skilled labour shortages in a lot of key manufacturing sectors that are actually slowing down growth. I mentioned that when I was in Midland a couple of weeks ago, several companies were talking about a $1 million expansion. We're talking about a town of only about 20,000, so it's a pretty big expansion and pretty big job creation.
They can't get the people to actually do that $1 million expansion. Certainly in our studies in the past when we've looked at these issues, we've seen that companies are actually withholding investing in their operations because they can't find people to do the jobs. So, there's a real concern on our part.
The second big part of the concern is the changing types of jobs. These aren't the same jobs that they were 20 to 30 years ago. Things are changing in the manufacturing sector. While there are a lot of the traditional jobs, such as welder or electrician, and a lot of the skilled jobs are still really important, now, more than ever, companies need multi-dimensional workers who are able to do multiple jobs at the same time. Often, our education system is not set up to train people that way, so that's another challenge.
What are we doing or what should we be doing about it? I guess I'd start by going back to something that Ms. Roberts said a few minutes ago, which is that we need to start with our youth. We're not getting enough youth involved. The challenge of manufacturing is that everyone thinks that manufacturing is kind of the way it was in the sixties and seventies: dark, dangerous, and dirty. They don't think of creating airplanes or jets or cars or guitars or really neat things that are going on. They think of steel, cutting down trees, and mining.
We need to reshape what modern manufacturing is: it's high-tech; it's innovative. If we can change the perception, it would get more youth in.