Right Skills, Right Place, Right Time - Viewpoint - careers advice blog Viewpoint careers advice blog

Right Skills, Right Place, Right Time - Viewpoint - careers advice blog It’s interesting to see how increasingly globally connected our world is. Multinationals establish businesses in numerous countries, products and services are sold in vast volumes across borders and highly skilled workers move to where the best opportunities exist, further fuelling the growth of those companies and nations that can attract them. In a world of supply and demand, this is the economics of labour and skills at its best. However, times are changing. High levels of local, lower-skilled unemployment and an increasingly widespread protest at mass immigration have rattled the politicians in more and more countries worldwide. Clamping down on immigration â€" any immigration â€" is seen as a vote-winner. The problem however is that legislation is failing to distinguish between skilled migration which helps a country prosper, and unskilled workers which can place an onerous burden on local systems and infrastructure as well as exacerbate local unemployment issues. First the US shut the door on highly skilled migration, ironic given that the US was built on immigration in the first place. The UK has followed that example by restricting opportunities for non-EU migrants to find work in the UK, while remaining powerless to restrict EU migration which includes large numbers of unskilled workers. Hence the Asian brain surgeon or engineer is turned away, but the unskilled European is welcomed. Similar themes in Canada and Singapore over the last few months and now Switzerland has voted to restrict EU migration. Given that a quarter of Switzerland’s population was born overseas, one can only assume that Switzerland will fail to fill all the skilled jobs that its industries will create over the next few years. It’s not that Switzerland does not produce highly-skilled individuals through its education system. It does, but it does not and never has managed to produce enough of them to meet demand. The same is true in almost every country in the worl d. A massive lost opportunity. The longer term solution has to be for each country to become more self-sufficient in educating and training the skilled talent their industries need. That puts the onus on governments, businesses and individuals to work closer together so that they collectively produce enough volumes of the right type of skills to fill the local jobs. However, in the meantime, businesses need to be able to access the best talent available for the highly skilled roles they are creating, so that they can drive economic prosperity for all. If that talent resides overseas, let them go and find it. After all, world-class companies need world-class talent by definition. However, the sad fact today is that thousands of highly skilled roles remain unfilled because the necessary talent is simply not available locally and companies are restricted from importing it. Governments must come to understand that talent mobility is a current reality for many larger companies, and the immigration debate needs to move on and clearly distinguish between unskilled and skilled workers. So, rather than being a threat, immigration policies should be seen as a tool to stimulate economic growth by allowing highly skilled workers more mobility to go where those skills are most in need. //