Companies Place For Skills, Not Life-Long Careers – Manpower CEO

Companies are increasingly prioritising skills development rather than offering life-long careers, as technological change drives skills shortages in a post-pandemic world, the CEO of U.S. staffing company ManpowerGroup said.

Employers “are not promising a 15-year-long career. But they are promising that when you join that organisation you will develop skills that make you more valuable and more marketable about what you want to do next,” Jonas Prising told Reuters in an interview published Friday.

Twenty years from now, the recruitment boss predicts that workers will be engaged in developing skills on a regular basis through their employment. “We will have more flexibility than we ever thought possible,” Prising said.

At the same time, technology is changing what skills are required and driving skills shortages already accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“That is something that organisations, economies and labour markets will have to contend with in the long term,” he said, adding that the current skills gap could grow wider in future if the workplace doesn’t adapt.

ManpowerGroup, headquartered in Milwaukee, is active in over 75 countries and hires out 600,000 workers daily.

(Reporting by Klaus Lauer, Writing by Rachel More)