The Leader - September 2007 - (Page 12) real e stat e maNaGemeNt Closing the Talent Gap: Companies and Communities Team Up by charlIe GraNtham aNd JIm Ware the key theme for the coreNet Global summIt IN atlaNta IN october Is “fINdING, GettING aNd keepING taleNt.” that’s What thIs artIcle Is about. We have beeN preseNtING a serIes of Workshops over the past three years focused oN hoW compaNIes aNd local commuNItIes Need to Work toGether oN addressING exactly thIs challeNGe. ompanies represent the demand side of the equation: they need the talent. Communities on the other hand represent the supply side: the talent lives there. This equation has gotten increasingly out of balance as people (the talent) increasingly make their locational decisions independently of their employment decisions. And we believe it is only going to get worse as talented people become increasingly scarce and begin to demand more than financial compensation in return for their knowledge and effort. We are absolutely convinced that both corporations and communities are facing a work force challenge that is completely unprecedented. And it won’t be solved with any traditional approaches. It’s time to rethink both talent management and economic development from the ground up. The simple fact is the over the next 10 years the demand for talent, especially but not exclusively in the United States, will far outstrip the supply. In fact, a recent survey by Manpower, Inc., found that fully 40 percent of over 33,000 employers worldwide are already having difficulty filling critical positions, as reported by Business Week magazine. Perhaps even more sobering is the fact that for the next 30 years overall population growth in the developed countries of the world (including the United States) will be below the rate of projected economic growth. And that means that the number of jobs to be filled will exceed the number of people to fill them by a wide margin. In fact, some forecasters have predicted that by 2012 there will be a demand for 10 million more workers than will be available here in the United States; th e le ade r C see Figure 1. (See also our article, “A Dirty Little Secret: The War for Talent is Over, and Talent Won,” Future of Work Agenda, October, 2003.) We believe it won’t be long before you’ll be hearing stories of firms that had to shut down a division, a profitable product line, or even the entire corporation, simply because they were unable to find enough talented people to do the necessary work. If this sounds at all like we’re crying wolf, pay closer attention. In our recently published book, Corporate Agility, we identify “Closing the Talent Gap” as one of the three most critical challenges facing businesses today (the other two are Reducing Fixed Operating Costs and Institutionalizing Innovation). And we argue that those three challenges can only be met by implementing what we’ve come to call 12 september / october 2007
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