When future historians write the account of the last 20 years of human progress, globalisation will feature prominently. It seems like the world has got smaller, economies have become more interconnected and populations more mobile.
The movement of the global population and workforce has been increasing for some time. According to figures from the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, the total number of international migrants around the world has risen from 153 million in 1990 to 271 million by 2019, an increase of some 77% and representing a sizeable proportion of the world’s population.
With the Covid recovery underway, there is nothing to suggest that this increase will not continue in the years ahead. It will change how we provide services to our clients and how we recruit to and structure our companies.
Agile offering
In this climate of increased mobility and international opportunity, as a service provider, we have a responsibility to create an agile, multi-service offering for the modern, globally mobile client.
People travel all over the world for their career, education or for personal and family reasons. Mobility at this scale requires a financial and legal advice model that can be present for people at every stage and potentially location in this journey.
Having the capacity to walk alongside them as they move through these life stages, as they travel the world, building their lives in a global community allows us to develop deeper and longer-lasting relationships with them.
This in turn means we can look after them better, anticipate their needs more accurately and make their complex lives easier, freeing them up to spend more time with their families, excel in their careers and achieve new personal and professional goals.
Disruption already underway
The events of the last few years have sped up the disruption to ages-old ideas around how we work, some of which haven’t changed since the Industrial Revolution, but the disruption was definitely already happening.
The increase in digitalisation and remote working and the rise in importance of employee experience were all present and are now established factors in changing the work blueprint.
These drivers, in combination with life expectancy continuing to rise, will result in people thinking less about their linear careers and more about the cultivation of a wide and stimulating portfolio.
This has been captured in the thinking around the 100-year-life and the impact it will have on how we shape our lives is valid and gathering traction.
To an extent we are already seeing this in the career choices made by the Millennial and Gen Z population who prize meaningful employment and who are willing to negotiate from early in their professional lives over work-life balance.
Candidate’s market
As employers, we should pay heed to this because a large part of rethinking the work model is about responding to what those just entering the workforce – the leaders of the future – are looking for.
If we want to attract the best candidates from a global market, we need to ensure we’re one of the most attractive employers out there. Show them we are serious about skilling, educating and empowering them in this global employment market and they will choose to work for us.
This is never more important than right now as in the UK, for the first time since records began, there are fewer unemployed people (1.257 million) than job vacancies, which reached a new record of 1.295 million in Q1 of 2022.
This all makes for a strong candidate’s market, where the pressure is on employers to differentiate and stand out from the competition if they want to attract the best people.
Right people, right jobs
At a global level, the picture is different, where in 2021 both unemployment and job vacancies were high. In spite of higher unemployment across many sectors, businesses and organisations are finding it harder to fill vacant roles.
What does this tell us? Quite simply that workers are in the wrong places with the wrong skills.
More effective global workforce mobility and employer flexibility can help bring the right people and the right jobs together and thereby go some way to closing this labour gap.
This is better for employers, the team members they recruit and, in service industries, the clients and customers at the heart of the endeavour.
