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DR JOSEPH BURSEN
As I've been saying, there are a lot of things that have been
changing in the world of work over the last few years. Businesses
nowadays are having to work harder to recruit people
with talent. You see.
what people have realised (and this in fact has become a sort of
management tenet) is that what really gives a company an edge is its
staff. In other words, to get ahead of your competitors you've got
to have better staff. This seems to be right across the board and in
almost all fields, but the fiercest rivalry has been amongst firms
in the technology and
financial sectors. And better staff means better managers,
better computer programmers better receptionists and better drivers.
Everyone. Interestingly, you know, this phenomenon started off in
the West, but that's been changing and now it's characteristic of
emerging economies as
well, where shortages of skilled personnel are becoming more acute.
Just take the south Indian town of Bangalore, which for years has
been a place where a lot of computer-based work has been outsourced
for companies around the world. In a sense it's become a victim of
its own success and it's thought that soon there may well be
vacancies for software
engineers. By some estimates as many as 200,000. Amazing,
isn't it? but why is it happening? Well in Bangalore the answer is
its booming IT industry that attracts customers from all over the
world. In Europe, on the other hand, the birth rate has been falling
and so university
populations have shrunk. There are fewer skilled people to go
round - more and more of the skilled workforce is made up of people
in their 40s, 50s and 60s. In fact, many of us could easily find
ourselves working on well into our 70s.
Another cause of the situation is bad planning. What I mean by that
is that an excessive number of students are actually doing what I'd
call the wrong subjects
at university – for example history, philosophy and literature,
things which interest them, not vocational courses which lead to the
sorts of jobs which are in demand nowadays. Also, workforces are
becoming more diverse. That's one of the by-products of
globalisation. Increasingly, organisations employ people in
different countries to work together on the same project, and so
multinational companies have difficulty finding people with the
necessary management
skills to coordinate such diverse teams and workforces. How to deal
with the problem? Well, it's not easy to attract good people when
there's such a choice of people and places to work.
Raising salaries
could be an option for some employers, but the trouble with that is
that the company's costs rise and they risk pricing themselves out
of the market. However, to deal with this situation many
organisations are ... |
