Shortage of talent, among the challenges for Mexico: Manpower

The pandemic came to accelerate the digitization processes, as well as the labor schemes or models, hand in hand with new skills that force the creation of new profiles of human talent; Hence, the question they ask is how to move from those operational, repetitive jobs with a tendency to disappear to take them to a new source of employment without having to increase the ranks of unemployment.

Mónica Flores Barragán, president of ManpowerGroup for Latin America, details in an interview the challenges facing the labor market and which are largely linked to the development of skills that companies demand.

Clearly, and after conducting studies and visiting various countries in Latin America, Flores Barragán states that there are sectors that are not going to return to pre-pandemic levels in the number of jobs for many reasons, including the leap in digital transformation.

Hence the question “how do we make these people who are here acquire the knowledge and skills to fill the vacancies that we currently have unfilled in information technology, logistics, electronic commerce, in the retail ecosystem And in the health ecosystem? Those sectors are growing and today we have unfilled vacancies”.

To the above, add the people who have been lost in sectors such as real estate, entertainment, and hospitality, “these are sectors that underwent a fundamental and structural change as a result of the pandemic, so we have to accelerate this migration of skills.”

For the board of directors that leads the largest human capital firm in the country, it is time to “not only talk about migration of skills, from sector to sector, but also reconversion of skills, promoting the certification of certain skills in a fast and accessible way for everyone, to encourage students to work while they do their academic training, and thus be able to start speeding up the operation of the machine”.

The ManpowerGroup Latin America board of directors explained that the shortage of talent has worsened in recent years, the main reason is that skills that were not requested before are beginning to be needed.

“Today we have much more difficulty than before in finding sales people, customer service, IT people and people related to the digitalization of processes, people in logistics, before they were not required so many, maybe they were in the first 10 places but not in the first 5 and what is new since the pandemic is the relative weight that academic or technical training has, this has decreased compared to the relative weight that companies give to human skills; Before, if you were a good communicator, it was not so important. Before, if you worked well as a team, it was not so important. Today it is essential”.

pilar.martinez@eleconomista.mx