How To Hire Needed Talent When People Are Moving Out Of The Workforce
We are now in a broad labour shift. And it is not just because of the Great Resignation (or Great Reshuffle) where millions of people resigned from their jobs after the COVID-19 pandemic. The current talent shortage is acute in STEM skills such as engineering, data management, and analytics; but it also includes shortages of blue-collar and white-collar workers such as truck drivers, call centre agents, and manufacturing skills. And it will get much worse. Companies must take a more systematic approach and build mechanisms for hiring now so they can succeed despite this challenge.
This fact partly explains the labour shift: More people are moving out of the workforce than are moving into the workforce. Our workforce population has been ageing and retiring or shifting to part-time jobs, and the next generation does not have enough young people coming into the workforce to offset this trend.
Furthermore, this shift in labour demographics is not a one-time event. Every year from now on, more people will leave the workforce than comes into the workforce; so, every year, we will have fewer workers available than we currently have. The college population will not replenish at a sufficient rate. Furthermore, universities now focus less on STEM skills and more on liberal arts. So, the labour population coming out of universities lacks training for the engineering and IT world
Trends arising from the labour shift
The demographic labour shift will result in several realities.
First, companies will need to invest more money and time in improving productivity. Since they will not have enough white-collar workers, they will need to invest in automation and other technologies to do the work that people were doing. We can already see this happening with self-service check-out counters at grocery stores and self-service functionalities in restaurants. Companies are now making enormous investments in automation for white-collar jobs. And it will intensify.
To read more : Forbes
