I am looking forward to seeing all of you next month at the Board Meeting / Harvick Pro Am, and wanted to quickly share some information with you. As I mentioned last month, our two main Career Services department priorities are:

1. Collecting compensation information via the PGA.org Compensation Profile (data below)

2. Solution planning for the labor shortage impacting the golf industry (and all industries)

We finished our Compensation Profile push with 938 Members and Associates in active classifications competing their profile on PGA.org. This represented 61.23% of the active membership, which placed us 3rd out of the 41 sections in terms of participation. Kyle Kirk, A-1 at Pinewild Country Club was drawn as the winner of the Amazon Gift Card for completing his profile.

It is important to remember that this is an evergreen profile...it can be edited at any time if a member gets a raise, changes jobs, etc. So please keep promoting the importance of the Compensation Profile to the members of your Chapters. Up to date data will allow us to create up to date reports, which are always the most accurate.

And speaking of compensation reports, I am working on designing a "live" report that members will be able to access via a website link and hope to have it ready in early October. In the meantime, I can get information for any member, but they will need to request it from me directly and it may not look very pretty yet.

Regarding the small labor pool. You may have seen that I partnered with the Carolinas Golf Association and South Carolina Golf Association to send an email to their database in an effort to identify anyone who was interested in working in the golf industry in some capacity. Over 100,000 people were emailed, and 104 responded. Some data on the people who do have an interest in working in the golf industry.

• 38 of 104 are interested in full time employment (36.5%)

• all 104 would be interested in golf operations work (100%)

• 29 of 104 would consider golf course maintenance work (27.9%)

• 37 of 104 would consider food & beverage work (35.6%)

• 86 of 104 are looking for work ASAP (82.7%)

• 18 of 104 are looking for work in the spring on summer of 2022 (17.3%)

If I'm being honest, this data does not paint a good picture. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was hoping we would have more interest in the industry than this. As you may know, PGA Career Services has hired 4 new employees whose main job is to recruit young people into the industry. Will it help??? I don't know. 4 people are not going to solve this problem. We really need the 20,000 active PGA Professionals to be seeking for talent wherever they can find it and offer them a job. Those people may need a little more training and a little more supervision, but some labor is better than no labor, and that is the reality we are facing right now.

Finally, some of you may know that I will be running the 50th New York City Marathon on November 7th to raise money for PGA REACH. I have never actually run a marathon before, so I am feeling a mixture of nervous and excited at the same time. My fundraising link is below...if PGA REACH is a charity you would like to support, I would appreciate any donation you can give and any additional promotion you can provide.