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Coming to Grips with the New Workplace:Exploring Skills Shortages

by Jennifer McCoy 

Have you noticed how your workplace has changed? You may be struggling with the skills shortage.

Or coming to grips with Gen Y, the group attracting all the media attention and frustratedconversations over dinner. Or you may be dealing simply with the pace of change and theincreasing pressure to deliver. Whatever is most obvious to you, certainly the pace of those changesseems to be accelerating.

Let’s focus on skills shortages, currently impacting most industries and also affecting individuals interms of workload and time pressure. Whether it’s health, manufacturing, IT, trades, engineering,finance, or transport, these challenges aren’t going to disappear quickly. Have you ever stopped towonder why we have such a skills shortage?

Perhaps you’ve assumed the problem was localized. In fact, the problem is far wider. The challengeis that skills shortages are global and the situation will probably get worse before it gets better.

We’re running out of skilled people. The pool is diminishing and that “war for talent”, predicted inbusiness articles, is already here. In a world where technology is a leveler, highly skilled, creative

people provide the sole competitive edge for a business. Talent and skills plus innovation drivebusiness success, if not survival.

The dearth of people is fairly simple to explain. Declining birth rates from the second half of the20th century, combined with the ageing of existing populations, are rapidly distorting the traditionaldemographic picture of society across the industrialized world. This is equally true of some of theemerging economies like China and India. There would seem to be an incongruity between accounts

of an overpopulated world and the realities of declining workforces. However, the United NationsDepartment of Economic and Social Affaires has captured the realities of an ageing population

globally in a pictorial map showing the percentage of the population that will be aged 60 years orover in 2050 – around 30% across these nations. Skills might be scarce now, but as our populations

age the situation will become more acute.

The problem is a little more complex though. We’re also losing people because we don’t know how

to keep them – the young, talented Gen Y with the world almost literally at their fingertips. We’rediscarding others because we don’t know how to use them effectively – the Baby Boomers with theirlifetimes of experience but, sometimes, outdated technological skill. If we’re going to solve theproblem for the long term we’re going to need to learn how to keep people at work and work

collaboratively with everyone in these new workplaces. We’re going to need to ask some morequestions about the way we work with people and then seek some interesting solutions.

Since skilled people are so much in demand, critical questions for business surely must be:

“What do we need to do to develop the potential of all the staff we’ve got now?”, and

“What can we do to keep these people?” 

An even better question to ask is:

“What do they need from us to enable them to be creative and to come up with ideas thatwill serve us well or give us a competitive edge?” 

Unfortunately, it would seem these questions are not asked frequently enough.

Business leaders are starting to agree. CCL’s 10 Trends whitepaper reports executives highlighting

the need for communication and collaboration as core skills for the future. Further, they observe

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“that leaders and organizations need to develop the mindset, culture and competencies that supportcollaboration”. That’s how our new workplaces must evolve.

This will involve creating workplaces:

• that encourage innovation, where people feel free to explore opportunities, voice opinions

without the pressure to conform and where the emphasis is on seeking solutions instead of laying blame

• where respect, genuine team work and the celebration of achievements really can create

positive changes

• where people are valued, difference is appreciated and where it is understood that every

person is capable of achieving his or her potential for making worthwhile contributions tothe workplace

• that allow for flexible working arrangements, where people feel safe to contribute at their

own level according to the needs of age or their inclination

These workplaces do demand a different mindset, not just from leaders but from everyone. Can youask and seek solutions to some of the questions I have posed? Can you create this kind of workplace in your own organization? It might be fun to try.

 

What the Researchers Say …

The Watson Wyatt Asia Pacific’s Ageing Workforce™ study, in 2006predicted that “by 2050, Asia Pacific will be home to most of the world’s

elderly people, with 998 million people aged 60 and above … in Singaporethe proportion of the population over 50 is set to increase from 23% to

50% over the next 25 years”. It recommends that employers will need tofocus far more attention on attracting and retaining older workers.

In Australia, a research report by the Productivity Commission in 2005,entitled Economic implications of an ageing Australia, offers a disturbing

graphic representation of our changing demographics under the caption“From pyramid to coffin. Changing age structure of the Australianpopulation 1925-2045”. This depicts a “coffin-shaped” future where thenumbers of people coming through to replace the current Baby Boomers

are far fewer.

Access Economics, in it’s Population Ageing and the Economy , reports that

the working age population between 2000 and 2005 grew on average170,000 per year. Their projection is that by 2010, growth will reduce to138,000 per year. And for the ten year span 2020 to 2030, it will only growby 125,000 in total.

 

References

Access Economics (2001). Population Ageing and the Economy ,http://www.accesseconomics.com.au/publicationsreports/showreport.php?id=49&searchfor

=2004&searchby=yearearlier

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Criswell, C. and Martin, A. (2007). Ten Trends: A study of senior executives’ views on the future,Center for Creative Leadership, Research White Paper,

http://www.ccl.org/leadership/research/sharing/index.aspx

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affaires (2006). Population Ageing 2006,

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/ageing/ageing2006chart.pdf 

Productivity Commission (2005). Economic implications of an ageing Australia - Research report ,

Canberra, http://www.pc.gov.au/study/ageing/docs/finalreport

Watson Wyatt (2006). Ageing Workforce™ 2006 Report: Asia Pacific,http://www.watsonwyatt.com/images/database_uploads/ageing_ap_06/AP_AgeingWorkforce2006.pdf