Why recruitment in Wales Is heading for a perfect storm
Why recruitment in Wales Is heading for a perfect storm
Subscribe to the Businessin Wales daily newsletter for FREE here.
Almost every conversation I have with business leaders and owners quickly gets on to the topic of recruitment.
Regardless of political persuasion, the NI increase was a terrible way to increase tax income and has had a big impact on entry-level recruitment, but it is just one part of the story. It feels like there is a perfect storm brewing in recruitment.
The demographics in Wales are against us.
The highly skilled, highly experienced Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce.
Gen X are highly skilled and experienced but much smaller in number and cannot replace the retirees – try hiring an experienced CFO or tradesman at the moment.
The millennials, now in their 30s, pick up in number but entered the workforce around the 2008 financial crisis, so did not get the early experience and training opportunities of previous generations and are under-skilled and under-experienced.
Gen Z numbers then drop off again, especially outside of major cities, which have the student and immigrant populations to make up the numbers.
The huge dent in twenty-somethings outtside of Cardiff is a significant drag on recruitment and the wider economy.
Future generation numbers are falling off a cliff. These demographics have a huge impact on potential recruitment pools and potential new customers for businesses.
On top of demographics, we have the skills problem. Only 13% of Baby Boomers had university degrees when they entered the workforce; many of them went directly into trades and on-the-job learning.
This meant they were trained early in technical and practical work skills. This has now completely reversed, so while Gen Z and millennials have much higher academic attainment, they lack workplace and job-focused technical skills and training.
Traditional educational qualifications have diminished in value for employers – school, college and university leavers’ qualifications offer little more than a rough guide to aptitude and skills relevant in the workplace.
Many businesses offer anecdotal evidence of an attitude problem: people not turning up for interviews, and people turning up for work on day one and never being seen again.
The numbers don’t lie, with one million 17–24-year-olds not in education or employment and one in four children suffering with their mental health. The pathway from education to employment is broken.
Almost every education reform of the past 30 years looks to have taken us backwards. No child should be leaving education without a career path ahead of them.
The solutions are complex; the education system continually works to exclude people, not include them, and one of the issues is that school is just not fun anymore.
Children are anxious and are being put off education at a very early age. Current qualifications do not contribute enough to future career pathways.
In my day, talented and smart people could take three years off at university doing an English degree while they drank and decided what they wanted to do.
That no longer makes sense when it comes loaded with debt and everyone else has done the same. It is a classic example of policy not seeing the wood for the trees.
Increasing the minimum wage for young people above the rate of inflation is not going to help when we need to be creating more entry-level opportunities for school leavers.
In the short term, all this means an increasingly competitive market for talent, skills and experience. Businesses all have to compete to be the “employer of choice” and invest more in retaining and recruiting staff. The intrinsic value to any business of good talent is increasing.
I’m not one for bemoaning the youth of today, though – this is very much an “us problem”, not a “them problem”.
Want more from Businessin Wales? Why not follow us on our socials
Listen to the Businessin Wales podcast
