The people who could solve your staffing problem already live here. They will not take the job as you have written it.

Rapid City has an unusual thing going on. It cannot find enough workers, and at the same time it is one of the most experienced places in the region, because a great many capable people move here specifically to stop working full time.

Ellsworth Air Force Base anchors the region with roughly thirty three hundred active duty airmen and about a thousand civilian personnel, and it is taking on the B-21 mission as one of only three bases nationwide, which will push personnel higher still. Around that base live more than eight thousand military retirees. Monument Health runs the regional hospital and serves an enormous rural catchment across western South Dakota and into Wyoming, Montana, and Nebraska, with health care employing thousands across the Black Hills. Tourism is the lifeblood, with four National Park Service sites and the state’s most popular state park within reach and thousands of hotel rooms to staff. Add the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Black Hills State, the Rapid City and Douglas school districts, the VA Black Hills system, Black Hills Energy, and the ranch and ag trade that runs through town.

Now put two facts side by side. Employers here report real difficulty filling roles, and the region keeps attracting people who are retiring rather than entering the workforce. Those two things look like a contradiction and they are actually the same fact.

Consider who is sitting in the Black Hills right now. Retired senior noncommissioned officers who spent twenty years training and leading people. Nurses who left the floor because of the hours rather than the work. Teachers, mechanics, foremen, and medics with decades behind them. They are not looking for a career. Most of them would take two days a week, or mornings only, or a stretch of seasonal work, or a role built around teaching somebody else rather than carrying a full assignment.

Almost none of them will apply, because nearly every job in town is posted as full time or nothing. The mismatch is not a shortage of capable people. It is that the work has been packaged one way for so long that nobody thinks of the packaging as a decision.

The organizations that break this open do a few plain things. They ask what someone would say yes to before assuming the answer. They split roles that do not actually need one person doing all of it. They create positions whose whole purpose is to develop other people, which is exactly the work a retired chief or a veteran charge nurse is best at and most willing to do. And they stop treating a person who wants fewer hours as less committed, which is the belief quietly doing most of the damage.

Every region has some version of this. Rapid City just has an unusually deep bench of people whose capability did not retire when their job title did.

Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and has keynoted state association conferences in eleven states, including LeadingAge Illinois and health care associations in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado.

Black Hills employers competing for the same small pool.

Healthcare is where Chris operates, and it is the sector with the most to gain from rethinking how a role is built.

Rapid City events Chris speaks at.

Booking a keynote speaker in Rapid City