“We need to act in a more coordinated and strategic way as a country--across all ministries but also together with employers--with our talent attraction strategy.”

This comment is from Inès Baer, Future Skills Initiative manager at Adem, the government’s employment agency. She describes the need for bigger-picture thinking when it comes to the problem of the skills gap.

The gap is, unfortunately, real. “We don’t have enough people in the local labour market to meet the demand,” she comments, specifying that even in the Greater Region it’s hard to source talent. It isn’t just niche technological expertise that’s missing, either: “This can be IT profiles, but it can also be butchers, for example… we don’t have, by far, enough butchers in the Greater Region.”

This gap exists across Europe, she adds. “So this whole competition for talent becomes more challenging.”

Big-picture thinking

The better-coordinated approach that Baer calls for is already in the works, albeit nascently. Since last year, Adem has been working with the OECD on the “National Skills Strategy in Luxembourg”, a national-scale strategy that brings together Luxembourg’s ministries, employer federations, professional chambers and unions. Thus, government, employer and employee voices will all be used to forge a common strategy and to identify where more instruments, financial support and incentives are needed--or where they already exist but aren’t used enough. The strategy should be ready by the end of 2022.

This project is a concrete step, but the process still has a long way to go. “We have a lot of pieces, be it on the public or the private side, to address the [skills] challenge,” Baer says. “And we are quite at the beginning of having the awareness that we need to put those pieces together, to create synergies, to act with a common vision and strategy.”

What employers want

While this harmonised vision slowly matures, several macrotrends on employer hiring practices have already become clear. In a nutshell, what companies want from employees is changing, and not just in terms of proficiency with the latest programmes or technologies.

At the end of 2021, the Future Skills Initiative published a series of in-depth sectoral studies into changes in recruitment practices in Luxembourg. Among other things, the studies used text mining to examine 142,000 job adverts posted between 2015 and 2021 in Luxembourg, in which 1.28m mentions of skills were collectively made.

Perhaps the most basic takeaway from the studies is that across every sector--trade, commerce, construction, hospitality, industry, finance and transport/logistics--employers want more. In other words, the raw number of skills mentioned per advert increased. “That’s already a trend,” says Baer, “showing that the requirements of employers in the labour market are tightening and increasing.” This data backs up anecdotal observations that the job market is becoming more complex and selective.

Another pan-sector trend is that transversal skills--including personal, language, management and digital skills, i.e. those that are transferrable from job to job--are growing in importance faster than any other skill. Technical knowledge, in contrast, has remained relatively stable. “Still important, but growing less strongly,” says Baer of the latter.

Expanding on this trend, Baer correlates the rising preference for more “human” skills directly with the rise of automation. “As technology becomes more capable of taking over routine, well-defined, structured tasks, it automatically places a bigger value on all of the skills that are difficult to automate, which are empathy, creativity, originality.”

A discrete but related finding is that, across all sectors, the most-requested skill is “adapting to change”. This reflects the fast-changing environment, Baer comments, and also implies a core shift in how people see their careers: rather than a stable existence as a specialist in x, y or z, constant flux and “lifelong learning” have become the norm.

Furthermore, employers are recognising that the skill of adapting to change is largely a mindset, and as such is hard to teach. “They can learn the specific skills on the job,” Baer says, commenting on what companies think of job applicants--“but the most important thing is the attitude.”

Still, the future is slow to arrive. “To be honest, many employers still want an electrician who has worked as an electrician and knows how to do the job,” she adds. “That hasn’t disappeared completely.”

New job territories

With the caveat that Adem isn’t placed exactly right to descry the emergence of new professions, Baer nevertheless shares some insights on novel areas. Sustainability-related profiles are one emerging area, such as roles in green construction (related to the disassembly of buildings or the recovery of materials) or green finance.

Another change is in cybersecurity, where the profiles sought are becoming more granular. “Before, we just had cybersecurity experts in demand… now it ranges from penetration tester to code inspector.” Specialisation is the general trend in IT, she adds.

New regulations such as those in finance, health, security, the environment, etc. also spur new roles, as personnel are needed to handle them.

The onus on employees

The world of skills is thus changing at the whims of some large and momentous forces: employer needs, which are based on the never-ending, ever-quickening march of technological change and automation; social imperatives, like the move towards a circular economy and sustainable practices in general; and top-down evolutions in regulation. Where does that leave the employees themselves?

“It can be very overwhelming,” says Baer about the reality that people need to become comfortable with change. “For most job seekers… the stress factor of having to always (again) adapt, reinvent themselves, learn new skills--the whole mindset of lifelong learning, which for many wasn’t taught in school--doesn’t come naturally.”

On the heels of accepting the instability of a profession comes, of course, the need to find both the motivation and the time to learn new skills. “That is quite a challenge,” says Baer. Help does exist, however. Job-seekers who register with Adem gain access to free training, while relevant outside training sessions can also be reimbursed by the organisation.

The employed also have options. Namely, employees in Luxembourg get 80 days (per person, per lifetime) of paid individual leave from their jobs to do training. “That’s not enough time to completely reinvent your profession, but it’s enough to keep up with trends and make sure that your skills stay up to date,” says Baer. She adds that this option is underused, however: only about 40% of employees in Luxembourg receive training in a given year, leaving 60% who don’t.

Upskilling, reskilling

If the Greater Region and Europe more generally are missing many sought-after profiles, then employers can’t simply keep looking further and further afield to make their hires. Indeed, reskilling and upskilling are at least half the answer to the skills gap. Adem is active in this area, given its traditional focus on job-seekers, with various training programs on offer.

Interestingly, however, the agency’s scope has recently--from the end of last year--been widened to enable it to help employers train employees as well. This represents, in Baer’s phrasing, “a big strategic change”.

“It’s important [to train employees]” she says, “because waiting until people are in unemployment… that’s a shame. It’s better to act preventatively.”

Even if the job climate is complicated, the opportunities in Luxembourg are not lacking, with the Future Skills Initiative having found growth in jobs in most sectors. “The Luxembourg economy is still very dynamic,” Baer comments, “even during the pandemic and now in the recovery phase. We see growth from IT to waiters in restaurants to construction workers. We see prospects in all kinds of areas.”