Right now, there are nearly 9,000 job openings within a 25-mile radius of Akron.
According to the job posting site OhioMeansJobs.com, employers across the state are trying to fill 81,000 positions.
And the current cover story in BusinessWeek says there are 3 million job openings in America, equivalent to the entire population of Mississippi.
So each time new jobless figures are released — such as Friday's Labor Department data showing the unemployment rate has climbed to 8.9 percent — some Northeast Ohio business leaders are reminded of a glaring gap contributing to our economic woes.
''We do not have a jobs problem as much as we have a work-force preparedness problem,'' said Baiju Shah, chief executive of BioEnterprise, a nonprofit business development organization that works with medical companies in the region.
''You could take unemployment down to 6.5 percent if you could just fill the open jobs.''
The problem, he said, is that many of the jobs require training that the recently unemployed do not have.
As the country continues a painful but inevitable transition from an industrial culture to a knowledge-based economy, Ohio has started to see the big picture.
The state-created Ohio Skills Bank seeks to build a pipeline of talented graduates and certificate holders to meet targeted regional economic needs.
In Northeast Ohio, work toward that goal is being carried out by the Regional Talent Network, a group of business leaders, educators and government officials discussing how to change offerings at universities, community colleges and independent training programs.
Their work has been supported by nearly $500,000 in grants from the Fund for Our Economic Future, a coalition of philanthropic organizations that pool their resources to assist in the region's economic development.
The region's growing companies ''have told us the biggest impediment to their growth is finding the talent they need to succeed in the global market,'' fund spokesman Chris Thompson said.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio has spoken at about 140 round tables in the state and ''at many of them, business leaders are telling him they're having trouble finding the right qualifications and skill sets for the kinds of jobs they're bringing to Ohio,'' said Brown spokeswoman Meghan Dubyak.
Last month, Brown introduced the Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success (SECTORS) Act of 2009. The bill supports the development of training programs at two-year colleges to meet regional work-force needs of emerging industries.
Shah said Ohio's elected officials deserve credit for ''hearing and absorbing the message.''
''They see the data, they understand and are trying to change the work-force system to be geared around the jobs that are open,'' he said.
But a big challenge is getting Washington to make worker retraining a priority, he said.
''A real stimulus act would be to help fill the 3 million jobs that are open, and those are sustainable jobs, not project work that will be temporary,'' Shah said.
More national attention would also make more workers aware that there are opportunities for reinventing themselves.
''Like everyone, [the unemployed] get caught up in the belief that this is happening to everyone and they can't do anything about it, but there are safe harbors in this storm,'' Shah said of the recession. ''It takes training, but people can reposition themselves.
''It might not be in your field, or it might not be right next door to your last employer, but there are jobs out there. The question left is: How do I use the benefits that I'm receiving from state or federal [agencies] to get the training I need?''
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