Bridging the Talent Gap

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Resource Management   Strategy   Talent Management  

Project Management Institute recently published the 2021 version of the Talent Gap Report. If you haven’t read it yet, you should, it’s an eye opener. The headline is the shortage of people available for project management-oriented employment (PMOE). About 25 million more people will be needed by 2030 compared with 2019. To put that in perspective, there were 90 million people in those roles in 2019 so the increase is close to 30%.

Hidden behind the headlines are some other numbers that should concern organizations. In that same time, 13 million existing project management-oriented employees are going to retire, and most will be at the top of the experience curve. That means organizations are going to lose a lot of knowledge and capability. And that’s going to be happening at a time when they are expanding the need to leverage that experience by introducing a lot of new project related workers who need to grow quickly. The flip side of that is that in developed economies retirements are the primary source of job opportunities for younger workers.

But perhaps the most important sentence in the report comes towards the end: “The global demand for project management talent is unlikely to be filled by 2030 unless organizations promote a culture of continual learning.” So, organizations are faced with a need for a significant increase in PMOE …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.