Contractors are likely to be the solution to filling skills gaps created as global worker demographics shift. They are ideally placed to help employers and national economies win what has been called by contractor recruiter Randstad the ‘war on talent and skills mismatch’.
Randstad’s second quarter Workmonitor survey of the global employee marketplace reveals that in many mature labour markets, such as Europe and the USA, there is a growing gap between increasing demand and decreasing supply as older, highly skilled, workers are retiring.
“The war on talent refers to an increasingly competitive landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees” says the report. “In most countries, around one third of the employees state that the organisation for which they work does not succeed in hiring well qualified staff to fill its vacancies.”
Contractors could help reverse this frightening statistic by offering their ‘turn-key’ knowledge and skills solutions. And they could do so on their traditional basis of being paid for results and output. The well-established contracting model also allows contractors with niche skills in high demand to share their services around many organisations, benefiting national economies as a whole, rather than their skills being locked in to a single employer.
The survey highlights that Europe in particular is suffering severely from skills mismatches, with employers not able to find “the right skills to fill job vacancies”. At the same time, across European countries, an average of 25% of all employees also admit that “the requirements of their current job are beyond their abilities”. In the UK the figure is 20%.
Whilst these figures are startling, they could simply reflect the fact that because of existing skills shortages, organisations are expecting more from existing employees than is reasonable.
In the UK, 36% of those employees surveyed would prefer a position with greater responsibility, even if there was no increase in salary to compensate for it, against a global average of a third.
The results of Randstad’s report suggest there could be a lucrative contract market awaiting UK contractors across Europe. However, contractors would have to overcome challenges such as establishing comparative qualifications, dealing with cultural barriers to flexible working, plus, of course, learning foreign languages.