Global Mobility and the Top Global Issues

At the end of last year, The World Economic Forum published their Global Agenda 2015 report, which summarized the top 10 issues that were thought to dominate the world over the upcoming 12 to 18 months. The identified trends range across the social, economic and political sphere and, naturally, many of these trends have implications for global mobility.

According to the Forum leaders, one of the most significant problems that had shown an increase over the previous report is growing unemployment. Termed ‘persistent jobless growth’ the trend refers to a situation, in which a population’s employment either is merely maintained or decreases, despite an economy demonstrating some level of growth. Indeed, rapid industrialization, use of technology, automation, and continuous globalization are all processes that can move economies forward and create more opportunities. At the same time, these processes drastically change the work environment, for example when technology replaces ordinary jobs and establishes requirements for new skills. As such, unemployment in times of economic growth would be a result of a mismatch between situational demands and labor resources. As noted in one of my previous blog posts, some workforce projections suggest a higher lack of skilled people for high-level jobs, while at the same time a lack of ordinary jobs for low-skilled workers.

The global nature of this skill mismatch and talent gap is evident also from Manpower’s Talent Shortage survey, which indicates that globally the percentage of employers with talent shortages has continued to rise in 2015. According to the survey data, skill shortages are the highest in the advanced economy of Japan. At the same time, many developing markets also experience pronounced talent shortages, for example Peru (68%), Hong Kong (65%), Brazil (61%), Romania (61%), and India (58%). In terms of workforce mobility this trend would require continuous recruitment and deployment of international talent, as well as ongoing diversification of expat destinations.

As such, the trend of ‘jobless growth’ seems to call for a more active relocation of the workforce that would match the needs, so that we could make better use of surplus labor where needed. At the same time, other global trends make this initiative harder. For example, the Forum leaders indicate that pollution, increasing water stress, and increasing occurrence of severe weather events due to climate change are within the top global issues as well. Developing countries with the highest demand for foreign talent are also among the biggest polluters (e.g. China, India and Brazil), and suffer the most from weather-related disasters and water stress. Although the topic of expat hardship allowances was on the rise already last year, an issue I wrote about previously, the continued significance of the topic suggests that it is unlikely to disappear from mobility managers’ agenda any time soon.

Finally, The World Economic Forum also included rising nationalism in the top 10 global issues. In light of the ongoing migrant crisis the issue may not come as a surprise but it has considerable implications for workforce mobility more broadly. For example, the Talent Mobility 2020 and Beyond report by PWC agrees that for the globalized business world the increased politicization of immigration is a problem. Given the uncontrolled inflow of migrants, many countries are tightening their borders and restricting immigration, which poses additional obstacles for managing even organized workforce mobility. Moreover, increased nationalistic moods may set a general tone that make foreigners’ adjustment and integration processes even harder.

In sum, as mentioned in the Forum’s outlook all of these threats also provide opportunities. The same can be said about global workforce mobility: the changing employment landscape and needs for global workforce distribution provide opportunities for global growth. However, in order to shift the trends towards opportunities, we firstly need to acknowledge the current threats and engage in their active, and globally collaborative, confrontation.