It was great seeing all of you in February at the Board Meeting and Super Show, and I have gotten bonus visits with some of you during the Spring Chapter Meeting Tour!

I wanted to start my report this month with a quick update. Long time Board members know that I have been heavily involved in the vision, planning, and creation of systems for PGA Career Services for the past 4+ years. I even apologized for the amount of time those projects were consuming in my June 2019 Board Report. After a tremendous amount of soul searching, I realized that I was no longer doing the job I really want to do, which is simply helping PGA members. I'm happy to report that I have asked to divest myself from all of those additional responsibilities so that I can fully focus my time, energy, and attention on the 2,000+ members of the Carolinas PGA. In the end, the PGA of America will be just fine without whatever skills I contributed, and I believe the members of the Carolinas PGA will be better served because of my decision. For the first time in quite a while, I am excited about the future.

As many facilities in the Carolinas are starting their seasons, there are currently 32 Assistant Professional positions posted on the PGA Job Board in the Section. This means 32 facilities are probably understaffed. While this is obviously not good, in my report from February, I shared some reasons for optimism regarding the labor shortage. And while the trend is still positive (7 new Pre-Qualifiers since March 1), I have mentioned in a few of the Chapter meetings that I believe labor will be the defining challenge of the decade for our industry.

I decided to take a deep dive into the data we have collected on the PGA Job Board regarding the number of job applications, specifically for Assistant Professional positions. As you probably expected, the data was not good, and in fact, it was worse than I thought. Looking at salaried, year-round (not seasonal) Assistant Professional positions in the section since the start of 2020, I found the following:

• Average number of applicants in 2020 - 11.57 (note, this was mainly early 2020, as the start of COVID slowed down job postings dramatically)

• Average number of applicants in 2021 - 5.41

• Average number of applicants year to date in 2022 - 3.34

Of course, those numbers provide no information about the quality of the applicants. 11.57 bad resumes is no better than 3.34 bad resumes, but I'd rather take my chances with a bigger labor pool. To state the obvious, this is not a sustainable trend, and hopefully we have hit the bottom.

As I have mentioned a lot recently, "Recruiting" is a hot topic at the PGA, and rightfully so based on those numbers. That brings me to three important points:

1. Job application totals and averages are probably the most important metric in measuring the success of our recruiting efforts. Our members need employees, and they need them now.

2. The only way out of this mess is to have 29,000 PGA Members helping us recruit new talent to the industry.

3. And we need to find a way to keep the people we already have...retention is as big an issue as recruiting.

I'm going to stop here, as I know that all of you are busy. As always, please let me know if you have any questions.

Mike Mueller

All Active Positions

PGA Compensation Profile - Carolinas Section Participation

Job Preferences - Carolinas Section Participation

Tab 1 - Names and emails of people who have applied to the Pre-Qualifier program. PQ applicants purchase and review the five qualifying level courses: Introduction to the PGM and the Golf Profession, PGA History, PGA Constitution, Rules of Golf and Career Enhancement to be eligible to register for the qualifying test through our third party test company virtually.

Please note that PGA HQ does not collect employment information at the time of PQ registration.

Tab 2 - Newly elected PGA Members