Rainer Strack: The workforce crisis of 2030 -- and how to start solving it now

https://www.ted.com/talks/rainer_strack_the_surprising_workforce_crisis_of_2030_and_how_to_start_solving_it_now

Rainer Strack is a human resources expert in Boston Consulting group. In this talk, he talked about the workforce crisis in 2030, and provided some solutions to enterprises and countries.

First, Rainer explained why he predicted the workforce crisis in year 2030. The reason is that he did not want to add too many assumptions into his prediction. By definition, the working age is over 15 and under 65. That means infants born today will be in their working age 15 years later. Therefore, Rainer can remove birth rate variable from his prediction. He then used Germany's birth rate statistics as an example, the diagram showed that labor supply would go down significantly between 2014 and 2030. As for the labor demand, Rainer used Germany's GDP and productivity growth over the last 20 years as base to calculate how many labors are required to maintain the same growth rate in 2030. Their calculation suggested that the gap between labor supply and demand is 8 million people. This phenomenon will not only happen in Germany, another diagram illustrated that in year 2030 we will face a global workforce crisis in most of the largest economics, except USA , India and Indonesia.

How to solve this issue? The general solution imposes by many governments are raising migration rates, extending retirement age and increasing women labor partition rates. Another solution is technology, automation robots could fill labor deficit gap. Rainer argued that people generally claims automation robots would increase unemployment for human society, but he believed that new technology would also bring new job vacancies. For example, the total labors involved in the production of automotive industry has only changed slightly in the last decades even robots and automation was used in this industry. However, the new job vacancies created by technology increases skill mismatch as well. Rainer believed this is the key issue for labor workforce crisis. High-skill people would be the scarce resource no matter for countries or enterprises. Because they are limited resources, he suggested that governments and enterprises should try to understand them more. So he did a survey and concluded 4 major factors to attract those talents. They are providing the work they appreciated, having a great relationship with their colleagues, work-life balance and having a great relationship with their boss.

Finally, Rainer suggested that no matter for countries or enterprises, they need a good people strategy to attract and retain talents. Employees are assets, resources but not a machines and costs.