The Worldwide Workplace

Solving the Global Talent Equation

M. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137361264
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137361271
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Traditional notions of work are transforming rapidly as we enter into the global workspace. Through interviews with leading experts, The Worldwide Workplace  gives readers a practical understanding of how to prepare for and capitalize on changes to the working environment.

chapter 1

The Century of Uncertainty

There are a lot of people on this little planet of ours. In the time period it took me to write the first draft of this book (30 days), the number of people populating the Earth rose from 7,174,521,162 to 7,183,196,576.¹ That’s 8,675,414 additional people! If you’d like another alarming statistic, despite famine, war and pestilence, we are incredibly good at producing people. From 1804 to 2011 we managed to increase the world’s population from one billion to seven billion – and it’s only going to take another 15 years to get to eight billion. The big issue is that a very large proportion of them would like a job. More than that, in even the most inhospitable spots, we are living a good deal longer. In Western Europe life expectancy rose from 47 in 1900, to 67 in 1950 and now it is 80. In mega-rich Monaco, citizens and tax exiles alike can expect to go on counting their coinage to a world-beating 89.5 years. There’s just one problem: in most developed countries the population is in decline. We of the industrialized nations live longer but have fewer offspring – we’re too busy working to have babies. In some places around this overcrowded globe of ours the decline is almost climatic as countries run out of people to do the jobs that keep society’s wheels in motion.

The upshot of these developments is a massive and ongoing reduction in young people entering the job market (although you’ll have a hard time convincing the youth of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal of this) and a storm surge of elderly people. Already over 50 percent of the population of the world’s developed countries are in the two so-called dependent groups (under 15 and over 64). Look at this table as an eye-opener of where we are:

As the old-age population rises, the working-age group shrinks. By 2030 the European workforce will be around 280 million, compared with around 300 million in 2011. This means that the European Union (EU) member states will need to import a vast army of new workers (estimates suggest 150 million over 20 years, giving the lie to the idea of rampant, uncontrolled immigration as being a very bad thing) just to maintain the present levels of service and support tax revenues that keep the whole machine going. Into that mix goes the fact that countries will be forced to raise retirement ages for their citizens from the current average of 65 to around 70 and more. This is already happening in many countries, despite the squeals of protest from the citizenry.

The demographic time bomb that is Europe, is mirrored in the US, where in 2013 labor-force growth was zero and expected to reverse (suggesting a shortage of working-age people of around 17 million by 2020). Some industries in the US are already in crisis. The medical profession has shortfalls of thousands of nurses and doctors.² Engineering firms across the US have reported a need to invest in new, robotic machinery (not new employees) because they can’t get the skilled workers they need.

Just to get you in the mood for what comes next, here are a few more demographic facts and figures to illustrate that the world of work and the global jobs market is about to become very interesting indeed. Or perhaps that word “uncertain” would be more appropriate:

– Japan’s population is falling off the proverbial cliff. Current estimates show today’s population of 127 million declining to 107 million by 2040 and shrinking dramatically further to just 87 million by 2060 Worse still, by then, just 50 percent of the population will be in the working-age category. This puts a country that has a fairly xenophobic attitude to foreigners seriously on the back foot. Population experts calculate that Japan would have to import over half a million immigrants every year just to maintain the current size of its working population. That shows no sign whatsoever of happening.

– Despite some recent economic woes, China is short of 10 to 12 million workers. And in a mind-boggling statistic, the UN has predicted that by 2040 the Chinese will have 400 million citizens over 65, a group larger than the combined populations of France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK.

– Across the rest of Asia, national governments are waking up to a maturing population and flatlining or collapsing birth rates. Soon they will face similar choices to the West.

– Australians – always prepared to be different – are averse to working past retirement. Just 49 percent of workers between 55 and 64 work, compared with 59 percent in the US and 65 percent in Scandinavia.

– The German Institute for Economic Research suggests that there may be as many as 50,000 of what it terms “missing” engineers. This is a direct result of a concern years ago that engineers were not needed and Germans chose to train for other occupations. This is called getting the job pipeline very wrong indeed. Elsewhere, the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector (the backbone of Germany’s economy) reports that four out of every five firms experience difficulties in getting the skilled people they require.

– Also, German SMEs are discovering that the current generation of the family are not that interested in going into the family firm (a situation mirrored across the EU and the US) and are creating a new uncertainty about how they will organize themselves in the future.

– The great Russian bear is bucking for cuddly toy status – shrinking before our eyes. From a peak of 147 million some years ago, there are now 143 million citizens, but this number is predicted to fall by a full 20 percent, to 111 million by 2050. Concerns that the once mighty Russian state will turn into a pipsqueak nation have prompted President Putin to call for cash incentives for couples to have more than one child.

– Germany faces the same population shrinkage as Russia. By 2050 the population is expected to reduce from today’s 82 million to around 70 million. Also, the population distribution will look very different in 2050 – mainly, much older. Whereas there are around 50 million people of working age (20–64) living in Germany today, this figure will drop to between 36 and 39 million by 2050. The average German by then will be 50 years old.

– While Japan, Russia and Germany face a shrinking citizenry, the United Kingdom faces the opposite – a population explosion. Current estimates suggest that the population is on course to reach 73 million by 2035. Just over two-thirds of the projected increase from 2010 to 2035 is either directly or indirectly due to migration. This will be due to people entering the UK, and also their future offspring. The UK is regarded as the most popular place in Europe to try and build a life and this shows no sign of diminishing anytime soon.

What all this clearly illustrates is that individual nations and whole regions are in a constant state of flux. More than that, to survive in anything like their present form, many countries are going to have to get a whole lot better at two things – immigration and outsourcing. Immigration because their ageing populations will force them to import talent to keep the nation-state alive, and outsourcing to other countries that can do many of the jobs that need to be done to keep the country operational.

The migrant mix

Migration has been a part of human history forever. Whole populations, persecuted peoples and those seeking a better stake in life have constantly changed the make-up of the world. Today, economic migrants – those who make a choice to move somewhere, as opposed to those who move because they have no other choice – make up a broad group. They bring all sorts of needed skills to all sorts of places.

When it comes to jobs, we tend to think at two ends of the spectrum: the so-called brain drain where scientists and highly qualified professionals move around the globe offering their services to the highest bidder; and, at the lower end, of the likes of Indian and Pakistani construction workers in the Middle East, working on possibly unsafe and unsupervised construction sites.

But, despite all the media frenzy built around foreigners coming into our countries and taking our jobs, they are – in reality – a fairly small group of migrants, compared with those who choose to stay at home.

Currently, there are around 200 million people (about 3 percent of the world’s total population) living outside their country of birth (accurate figures are difficult to calculate). This is about double the amount of 1985. Demographers suggest that most immigrants move to developed countries and that this will result in an average gain of around two million people every year until 2050.

But migration is not confined to the one-way street of poor country to rich country. In the UK, 1.5 million graduates left to seek out opportunities in the US, Canada, Australia and the European Union. This compares with the 1.3 million graduates who came to the UK in the same period in search of better jobs. While the UK may be growing in population and is a real talent magnet for job seekers, it also exports one in six of its graduates. On the other hand, in France (which has the lowest migration rate of any OECD country), only 1 in 30 leave the home turf. This may have something to do with language – English being the lingua franca of commerce. It pays to remember that there is always a good reason for a statistic!

Massive shortages

As we saw earlier with the Filipino nurses streaming to UK hospitals and creating a massive shortage in their own country, economic migration in search of that better job is plunging many emerging economies into deep trouble. According to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), “poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing sometimes staggering numbers of their college-educated workers to wealthy industrialized democracies.” Researchers found that between a quarter and almost a half of the college-educated nationals of Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Nicaragua and El Salvador live in the 34 OECD member states.³ The ICPD report goes on to say that, “for Haiti and Jamaica the number rises to more than 80 percent. In contrast, less than five percent of the skilled nationals of the great behemoths of the developing world – India, China, Indonesia and Brazil – live in a member country.”

Such is the impact of foreign workers doing jobs in developed countries that the health sector now employs 21 percent of all foreign workers in Norway, 19 percent in Sweden, 14 percent in the UK, 12 percent in the Netherlands and 11 percent in the US.

However, there is good news too. A World Bank report shows that immigrants repatriating money earned from these overseas jobs have substantially reduced poverty in countries such as Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines. Indeed, Romania now receives more than five billion euros a year from workers employed in the EU.

Again according to the ICPD, these are just the most visible parts of a reverse brain drain. They say that this diaspora brings four other key benefits to these emerging countries:

– It spurs the transfer of technology and business practices back to the home country.

– The immigrants ignite the growth of business back home.

– Migration of talent overseas creates job opportunities in the domestic market, raises domestic salary scales and motivates others to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

– In the next stage, foreign companies implant their operations in the migrants’ home country to access local talent without moving them overseas.

But there is one other thing to keep in mind; in most developed countries the citizens don’t move very much at all. Indeed, according to studies in the EU countri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Century of Uncertainty
• 2 Seeking Out Work Opportunities
• 3 People, Positions and Places
• 4 What the Workplace Looks Like
• 5 Making a Career Inside or Outside the Organization
• 6 Educate, Educate, Educate
• 7 The Organizational Challenges
• 8 The Workplace of the Future, or More of the Same?
• Index