“The biggest flaw in our thinking [in the United States] is that we need only a small number of well-educated, career-specialized people to run the economy,” says Edward Gordon, president of Chicago-based Imperial Consulting and author of “Winning the Global Talent Showdown: How Businesses and Communities Can Partner to Rebuild the Jobs Pipeline” (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009; more information here). “Those days are over because we’re in an entirely new economy…”

Gordon believes the U.S. has arrived at a talent tipping point. The “United States is facing a growing structural unemployment crisis. In spite of an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, there are currently about 3 million vacant jobs for which employers have not found qualified applicants,” he writes in this blog entry. “This number is projected to rise to between 12 to 24 million vacant jobs by 2020 unless our education and training pipeline for employment is significantly improved.”

We still have time to address this risk, Gordon told me at the end of one of our conversations, but “it’s a question of whether we have the cultural will to do so.”