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For immediate release: Wednesday, May 23 2012
Businesses unconcerned about looming “skills gap”, says Economist Intelligence Unit
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Despite an ageing workforce and the prospect of widespread employee shortages, senior executives are not worried--at least not for the vast majority of positions. According to Plugging the skills gap: shortages among plenty, a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by SuccessFactors, just 20% are pessimistic about their company’s ability to find sufficiently skilled workers within the ranks to fulfil their business objectives over the next three years.
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Respondents recognise, though, that shortages in two specific areas--the engineering/technical and strategy/corporate development job functions—threaten long-term economic growth. Sixty-three percent of those polled say it is “difficult” or “very difficult” to find suitable job candidates in the engineering/technical function and 56% say the same of strategy/corporate development.
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Other key findings include:
· Executives downplay the importance of people management skills. Respondents were asked which internal management strategy they use most frequently to retain skilled workers and improve their productivity. Strikingly, a mere 9% cited “ensuring that managers throughout the organisation possess excellent people skills”. This disregard for the importance of people management could undermine the ability of companies to retain the skilled workers they do possess, and may well thwart their attempts to combat specific long-term skills shortages.
· Strategic leaders are hard to find.Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents agree that the higher the level in the organisation, the more difficult it becomes to find the requisite skills. Respondents were particularly concerned about a lack of strategic vision (55%) and an inability to handle complexity (36%).
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· IT and energy industries more likely to staff up than others. Thirty-six percent of respondents in IT/technology and 28% in energy envisage a large net increase in staff numbers over the next three years compared with just 10% in manufacturing and 6% in life sciences.
Plugging the skills gap: shortages among plenty
is available free of charge at http://www.managementthinking.eiu.com/plugging-skills-gap.html
Press enquiries:
Joanne McKenna, Press Liaison, +44 20 7576 8188;
Gilda Stahl, Report Editor, 1.212.554.0641
Notes for editors
The Economist Intelligence Unit survey was carried out in March 2012. The 248 respondents were based mainly in Asia-Pacific (30%), Western Europe (28%) and North America (25%). The following industries were surveyed: energy and natural resources/ oil and gas (23%), construction and engineering (21%), healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology (20%), IT and technology (19%) and manufacturing (17%). Forty percent of respondents were C-level or board-level executives, and 62% were from companies with annual revenue in excess of US$500m.
About the Economist Intelligence Unit
The Economist Intelligence Unit is the world leader in global business intelligence. It is the business–to–business arm of The Economist Group, which publishes The Economist newspaper. As the world's leading provider of country intelligence, the Economist Intelligence Unit helps executives make better business decisions by providing timely, reliable and impartial analysis on worldwide market trends and business strategies. More information about the Economist Intelligence Unit can be found at www.eiu.com or follow us on www.twitter.com/theeiu.
About SuccessFactors (an SAP company)
SuccessFactors, an SAP company, is the leading provider of cloud-based business execution software, and delivers business alignment, team execution, people performance and learning management solutions to organisations of all sizes across more than 60 industries. With approximately 15m subscription seats globally, SuccessFactors delivers innovative solutions, content and analytics, process expertise and best practices insights from serving its broad and diverse customer base. Today, SuccessFactors has more than 3,500 customers in more than 168 countries using its application suite in 35 languages.
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