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ABSTRACT
In the next 10 years, employment skills and personnel in the United States are expected to continue to shift. The new workforce will be filled with a large number of new entrants, many of whom will lack the professional savvy to negotiate in the active, intergovernmental arenas. The majority of the new workers will be people of color, immigrants, women, and the disabled. Additionally, the changing workforce demographics will yield a sharp increase in the number of workers under 25 and over 45 and a decline in the number of workers between these two groups (Rogers, Toder, & Jones, 2000). Many of the demographic challenges faced in the U.S. workforce are also being faced globally.
Integrating the new workers into the public sector workforce will challenge the current way public administrators manage the public enterprise. Although the roles and responsibilities of public administrators may not change dramatically, ways of conducting business in the public sector will morph as technology and interdependency - organizational, regional, and global - take on even greater importance. How to best prepare, integrate, and respond to the diversified workforce will be the major challenge. How public administrators around the globe handle this challenge will result in how responsive and effective government becomes. This paper examines the challenges posed by workforce diversification globally and explores possible approaches to successfully meet the administrative challenges of change. It finds that public administrators worldwide have a pivotal role in making the changes necessary to successfully manage diversity and transition the new workforce entrants into productive employment.
INTRODUCTION
For the past 100 years, the U.S. has prided itself on being a country of diversity. It took decades for the United States to accept the idea that a diverse population was beneficial to the social and economic fabric of society. Slowly, the realization that diversity facilitates economic, social, and political growth has permeated social thinking along with the acceptance that diversity is an inevitable part of a changing world order. World-wide, population trends point to an aging population and a migratory population. The migratory nature of the world's population poses an increasing challenge in the employment sector as immigrants from all economic sectors have found it necessary or convenient to relocate across the globe. Dynamics...