Besides the more traditional avenues of career fairs, staffing companies, college recruiting and online want ads, the Brown Deer, Wis., company has been making classroom presentations to engineering student clubs and calling human resources departments that might be laying off engineers.

"I used all of my LinkedIn and Gmail networks," said Carol Crawford, Hampshire's general manager.

At the Milwaukee School of Engineering, more seniors are weighing multiple job offers and more employers are willing to cross-train the students they hire. The school expects its biggest graduating class in memory next month - 322 new engineers. But it's not enough.

"That's a big class," said Mary Spencer, placement director. "However, it doesn't meet the needs of all the employers."

No surprise to Spencer or to Crawford, engineers top the latest list of "Hardest Jobs to Fill" released last week by Manpower Inc.

The third annual employer survey shows a growing mismatch between the skills that businesses are wanting and what jobseekers possess. Besides highlighting intense demand for specific occupations, the list underscores broader concerns over a looming retirement boom and a thin bench of replacements.

"A lot of these positions are careers held by baby boomers, or the older generation, and they're retiring," said Melanie Holmes, vice president of world of work solutions for Manpower North America. "These are not positions necessarily that young people are going into, and I think that's one thing that we're seeing here - that people are retiring, and young people are not going into these things."

To generate interest in engineering, more employers, educators and professional groups are reaching out to children through collaborative school programs.

Meantime, demand for engineers is outrunning the supply, in part because of what employers value in engineers.

"They are problem-solvers by nature and they are technology-savvy by training," explained Ronald Perez, interim dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Also high on the chart from Milwaukee-based Manpower are machinists, skilled manual trades workers, mechanics, laborers and production operators.

And those are workers that the 2,000 employers surveyed said they're struggling to hire even though the U.S. economy could be in a recession. In fact, 22 percent of the employers reported having trouble filling jobs because of insufficient candidates, compared to 41 percent in the 2007 survey.

"Unemployment is rising in the United States, so there are people out there looking for work," Holmes said. "At the same time, there are companies looking for people. So it's a skills mismatch, not a shortage necessarily of warm bodies."

Holmes also noted that the hardest-to-fill list contains few positions requiring four-year college degrees, suggesting a greater role for technical and vocational schools.

How to better prepare workers for the new jobs and retirements ahead was discussed at a public forum Monday at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The event, sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, drew about 30 people.

"There is an imperative, and we must act now," UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago, said, affirming another panelist's call for improving the nation's approach toward educating and training workers.

That other panelist, Emily DeRocco, president of the National Center for the American Workforce, cited a "fractured" education system requiring "deep and dramatic reform." Among her suggestions was creating multiple pathways to high school graduation that would include vocational training and work experience for students who aren't college-bound.

As senior vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, DeRocco also advocated touting the earning potential of manufacturing work, including the skilled trades, as a way to attract more young people into careers facing technological advances and mass retirements.

Jeff Joerres, chairman and chief executive officer of Manpower, stressed that the U.S. workforce needs to develop in the context of a global economy where some countries can build their education and training systems from the ground up.

Reforming the U.S. system will be more challenging, said Sister Joel Read, past president of Alverno College. "We tend to take things for granted," she said, "and we get stuck in things we're not able to move."