Talent shortage remains until at least 2050, Labor Market professor says - increasing labor productivity is needed

Vinal Hindocha, Ingelou Stol

By Team IO

A talent shortage in the Netherlands is expected to persist until 2050. So concludes Ton Wilthagen, professor of Labor Market at Tilburg University, in the new High Tech Campus Eindhoven documentary The Talent Game: “Even if we attract more international knowledge workers, work more hours and involve people from the sidelines in the labor market, the talent shortage will remain.” Wilthagen stresses the importance of investing in the right sectors to make the Netherlands and Europe future-proof. Increasing labor productivity is needed; artificial intelligence and social innovation can contribute to this.

The documentary The Talent Game: Battlefield or Playground, directed by Ingelou Stol (High Tech Campus Eindhoven) and Vinal Hindocha (House of Yellow), offers a behind-the-scenes look at tech companies ASML, SMART Photonics, and Axelera AI. The film shows how companies, from multinationals to start-ups, find and try to retain technical talent.

An important theme in the documentary is the potential of women in tech, “who can be an important solution to the talent shortage in the industry,” says Stol. “Women are an untapped source of expertise.” Recent research by McKinsey shows that Europe needs to attract and retain women in tech to remain competitive in technological growth and innovation.

Shortage of 70,000 talents in Brainport Eindhoven

The Brainport region faces a shortage of 70,000 people in engineering and IT over the next decade. “It is important that the city of Eindhoven and the surrounding villages and cities remain accessible. Brainport Eindhoven must become a technology hub accessible to everyone, not just the highly educated,” said Paul van Nunen, Director of Brainport Development. “That’s why we need to build housing for people with different salaries, for example.”

In the coming years, the region will need to make significant efforts to attract and train the essential talent needed to address shortages in the technology industry. “We need all the talents of people who are not working in a professional setting now. We will have to start training a lot of people, attract international knowledge workers, increase labor productivity and increase retention in the engineering sector. And we will have to do that all at the same time.” Van Nunen acknowledges this is a huge challenge, although “I think we’ve proven that if it can be done anywhere, it’s here.”