In Conversation: The Talent Crunch

The declaration that people are an organization’s most important asset carries significantly more weight in the 2022 job market. What has been described as “the great resignation” proved not to be an overstatement. The pandemic has deeply altered global labor markets in ways still not fully understood, but statistics clearly show that record numbers of people have quit or are planning to quit their jobs. According to a recent PwC report, one in five people plans to quit in 2022; in the energy sectors, including chemicals and petrochemicals, 75% of professionals are also considering a career change in the next three years, as revealed in the 2022 Global Energy Talent Index (GETI) Report.

Jayden Wallis, chief marketing officer and SVP at international workforce solution provider Airswift, which is the company behind the GETI study, told GBR that the dominant theme in this year’s report has been that of “talent in transition” - This transition means many things, among which the significant movement in the job market, like heavy job hunting and headhunting, retraining and career shifting, but also a greater impact of the energy transition on job perception, and a greater migration of workers into roles that are related to the energy transition. The main change, said Wallis, is that the balance of power has tilted back from employers to employees: “In 2020-2021, the biggest issue facing employees was job security, but this year the biggest issue is career progression and development – which shifts the responsibility to employers who must make sure they provide those opportunities and attract new employees.”

This increased competition for talent aggravates an old problem for Singapore, which, as a small but thriving economy, has for long struggled to fill in positions, not for lack of talent availability, for the city-state attracts the best candidates, but for the high turnovers and the costs of hiring and/or retaining professionals. For both high-paying work and manual work, Singapore depends extensively on foreign workers. Out of the 5.6 million people living in Singapore, over a million are foreigners. The Singaporean authorities have passed new visa rules raising the threshold for admission into the Employment Pass (EP) program in a bid to ensure more locals have access to high-paying jobs. Furthermore, the number of students pursuing STEM degrees, and particularly chemicals, is declining, according to multiple studies.

The energy and chemicals sector in Singapore employs about 25,000 people, and the government wants to see the sector create another 1,400 new jobs by 2025 as part of the Industry Transformation Map. To fill these positions, chemical companies are increasingly more aware of the dynamics in the job market, but also of what can make their organizations stand out. Adequate work-life balance, an organizational culture that promotes diversity, inclusivity, and transparency, corporate values that resonate with employees (including a focus on ESG), remote and hybrid work flexibility, opportunities for training and job progression, and a supportive leadership style are consistently found to be the key ingredients employees seek. To create organizations where people are indeed the most valuable asset, CEOs must steward holistic strategies and put all these different considerations into application. GBR spoke to different industry leaders who shared reflections and concrete initiatives on this topic: