Finally, some journalists are starting to catch on. Future economic growth is, of course, partly driven by unemployment rates. But the real threat to long term growth and sustained quality performance is skill shortages.

If you don’t believe me, wrap your mind around these numbers. In the last decade, the number of workers in the U.S. age 55+ has grown almost 12 million, up more than 60%, to 31 million. At the same time, workers age 20-24 grew less than 1 million, up only about 14% to 15.2 million. The numbers aren’t exactly comparable, but it’s obvious there are a lot more skilled employees getting ready to exit the workforce than entering it.

Top executives in sectors such as utilities, aerospace, manufacturing, healthcare, and even government recognize this problem intellectually. But minimizing the impacts of skill shortages on organizational performance is going to take both top management commitment and new talent management capabilities. Whether your company is lacking the will or skill to tackle these problems, here are four things you can do to overcome the clash of demographics and talent.

A. No will or skill to address looming talent shortages — Organizations with a lot of leadership turnover in recent years are more likely to be in this category. The same goes for bureaucratic public sector agencies plagued by recent budget cuts and layoffs. There is no appetite in these organizations for engaging on longer term talent management challenges. The critical first step here is engaging leaders emotionally to create urgency on these challenges. We address this problem of creating urgency directly in chapter 9 of our new book, The Executive Guide to High Impact Talent Management.

B. Low will, but lots of resources to address looming skill shortages — Plenty of organizations today can boast fairly mature talent management practices and, indeed, they are doing a lot of things right. This leads top executives to believe that critical skill development and workforce planning can be delegated to human resources. One CEO of a major, multinational consumer products company learned this lesson when he tried to create a globally integrated enterprise. An audit of the firm’s highly touted succession planning process actually revealed a serious shortage of qualified successors ready to fill the firm’s top 200 positions.

Even when an organization is investing heavily in recruiting, developing and retaining talent, don’t assume those programs are producing the results essential for future strategy implementation and growth. Leaders must continually ask hard questions about talent initiatives, such as: How do we know our leadership development program is working?

C. High will (i.e., lots of motivation) to address potential skills shortages, but limited capabilities to do so. Many organizations fall into this category today. Leaders are highly motivated to address the problem, but they don’t know what to do. A lot of training programs in place today are going to be inadequate to develop the skilled professionals and leaders that will be needed soon. For example, over 100,000 jobs must be filled in the utility sector in less than a decade. One key job is linemen. But, the combination of physical and engineering skills required to work atop of utility poles can lead to a drop-out rate of over 60% in training programs. In many areas, such as nursing, manufacturing operations and even general leadership development, we are working with executives who are demanding out-of-the-box thinking about new ways to accelerate talent development.

D. Plenty of will and high skill in addressing future talent shortages. Very few organizations fall into this category. GE, the world’s largest producer of medical-imaging equipment and jet engines, is trying to reload its pipeline of engineers and young managers. So last year they doubled their college-hiring program in the U.S. But even GE, which spends $300,000 per recruit in a two-year training program, has had to rethink the way it invests in talent development. One question GE has faced is whether to keep using a centralized “top-down, university model of training,” which can take people away from their jobs for weeks at a time.

Even organizations that have been the gold standard in talent development will have to get more creative to keep up with the growing skill shortages that threaten innovation and growth. Where is your organization today in understanding these challenges and the changes that are needed?