The great mismatch
Skills shortages are getting worse even as youth unemployment reaches record highs
IN PARTS of Europe and the Middle East more than a quarter of 15- to 24-year-olds do not have a job. In some black spots such as Spain and Egypt the figure is more than a half. Altogether 75m of the world’s young people are unemployed and twice that number are underemployed. This not only represents a huge loss of productive capacity as people in the prime of life are turned into dependants. It is also a potential source of social disruption and a daily source of individual angst. The Japanese have a word for the 700,000 young people who have withdrawn from society into domestic cocoons: hikikomori.
Yet at the same time companies complain vigorously that they cannot get hold of the right people. Earlier this year Manpower, an employment-services firm, reported that more than a third of employers worldwide had trouble filling jobs. Shortages are pressing not just in elite areas such as engineering but also in mid-level ones such as office administration. This week McKinsey, a consultancy, reports that only 43% of employers in the nine countries that it has studied in depth (America, Brazil, Britain, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) think that they can find enough skilled entry-level workers. Middle-sized firms (between 50 and 500 workers) have an average of 13 entry-level jobs empty while large employers have 27.
What is going on? And what can we do about it?
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