There is a coming $10 trillion global talent shortage crisis in the next decade or two, and in most of the top economically productive countries of the world that contribute to our global growth. This is the view shared by Rainer Strack and his team at
Figure 1. Rainer Strack: The surprising workforce crisis of 2030 (TED@BCG)
The BCG team examined 25 major economies including the G20 and modeled their labor supply to see where they stand in 2030. They postulated two projections, the first based on 10 year past trends of growth and labor supply per country, and the second based on 20-year trends of the same. While it is specific per country, the 10-year is a steeper growth curve.
Figure 2 shows the end result at 2020—just 5 years from now—and 2030 per the two growth rate models. Keep in mind both extremes can cause problems: excess labor surplus can lead to high unemployment as there are too many available people and too few jobs. On the other hand, most of the issue here is in the labor shortages (in red) and low growth (in orange).
Figure 2: Global Workforce Crisis (source: Boston Consulting Group)
If you look to the right column of the image, that is all labor shortages, and it happens pretty much in all but a few of these 25 countries. Even surpluses in Saudi Arabia, Russia, South Africa and Argentina can still mean high unemployment.
What can we do?
What can we do to reduce the impact in the 15 years we have till then? The BCG paper suggests the four following actions:
- Boost productivity through capital investment in infrastructure, innovation, technology, and social and training programs
- Increase labor participation (increase retirement age, encourage more women to participate, jobs for the elderly, increasing working hours)
- Increase immigration and mobility, and cross-border talent
- Encourage higher birth rates (although that is unlikely to impact by this time)
While the BCG paper suggests this on per immigration and talent mobility: "By 2030, most of the 25 economies in our study will face shortfalls. Thus, increasing talent mobility can be regarded as only a limited solution." I think this limits thinking that only these countries can contribute talent to the global economy.
I think there's a big underestimation of sources of talent, as well as new ways people can work across borders and who can work. As I’d pointed in a past article, In a Few Years Nations May Need us to Work Past Retirement Age, which looks at how to employ an aging workforce through technology assistance of tele-presence, pairing with younger workers, and crowdsourcing the work in smaller slices. That article spoke of how Japan with its high aging population is looking for ways to address this issue.
CEO of XPRIZE and co-founder of Singularity University, Peter Diamandis agrees on this point about global work: Technology is rapidly dissolving national borders. He calls out telepresence and virtual work environments (location), language translation, and digital currencies like bitcoin, as three factors that increase the move to a more borderless future of work.
Consider the new ways that we are outsourcing or crowdsourcing work over the Net. Also consider how we are time-slicing more work, and adding more context to the skills and expertise needed (and available). The Beyond Jobs project in the UK is a practical example here. Wingham Rowan, their Director, describes how the idea of national markets that allow employers to find workers for specific tasks but only for specific amounts of time, on demand as necessary.
Therefore, it is possible that technology can address all the first three of the suggestions that Mr. Strack and BCG suggests. (I’m not sure I’d want technology to assist with the fourth item of increasing the number of babies.) But in doing so we also create new challenges and issues we are only barely starting to tackle.
What we need to see however, that the word “employer” isn’t quite it any more, or at least what it means in the traditional sense. To coin a phrase, we are looking more at the notion of multiployment—where one can work for multiple organizations at a time. Some would argue this would simply be a freelance agent or independent contractor scenario. That is true but I am speaking of the macro situation for organizations overall and the economy, and combined with the impact of borderless work.
What happens when the majority of the people in the organization are never employees? How do they deal with benefits or do they even need it? How does the economy itself handle this majority situation? How is time-slicing on this level impact people’s work behavior and attention? How do you tell if more is getting done? Who do you trust to work with over and again?
These are issues a world of multiployment and borderless work raise at the intersection of work culture, tech, labor policy, and productivity. If you don’t think this is a real possibility, it is already happening with the workforces of startups in the sharing or collaborative economy, like Uber and AirBnb. They are raising new issues of the legal state and how we manage the “1099 workforce”. Jeremiah Owyang, founder and chief catalyst at the Crowd Companies association, describes some of these issues in a Wall Street Journal article, The Ups and Downs of Crowd-Based Resources.
Multiployment is a complex mix of technological and labor policy issues that we have yet to address broadly in our economies. We have found many ways of collaborating across large groups supported through technology. We have made scientific discoveries through crowdsourcing, as well as helped human relief efforts in Haiti and elsewhere. We have created multi-billion dollar companies in a market space many ridiculed only a few years back. And now we are on the verge of understanding a new state of work in a global economy.
