Maybe not, writes Ben Casselman for fivethirtyeight.com:

Rather than degrees or licenses, what employers say they are struggling to find are workers with industry-specific skills, such as how to program the machines that do much of the physical work in modern factories. But according to a new paper by economists Andrew Weaver and Paul Osterman, companies looking for workers with specialized computing skills don’t have any more trouble filling their vacancies than anyone else. (Advanced math was more of a stumbling block.) And three-quarters of manufacturers that Weaver and Osterman studied weren’t having trouble finding workers at all. Other researchers have similarly found little evidence for a serious skills gap, either in manufacturing or in other sectors.

The latest economic data doesn’t show much sign of a skills mismatch, either. If finding qualified workers is so hard, for example, then companies should be offering higher pay to attract and retain precious workers. That isn’t happening. Average hourly earnings for manufacturing workers were up 2.5 percent in August from a year earlier, before adjusting for inflation; that’s the same rate of growth as for workers in the rest of the private sector. Nor are companies pushing their existing employees to work overtime; weekly overtime has trended down since the start of the year.

Similarly, if qualified workers are such hot commodities, we would expect to see companies poaching them from each other. But the number of factory workers voluntarily quitting their jobs (whether to take new ones or for some other reason) has risen only slowly in the recovery and remains well below its prerecession level.