In our inaugural feature article for the Engineering Staffing Report, it seems fitting that we focus on the industry globally given that an increasing number of firms are looking to expand internationally.
An accurate figure for the scale of your addressable market is a critically important data point for effective management. The Global Staffing Industry 2015 report,only available to corporate members, provides market size estimates by skill segment for major staffing markets around the world.
The US is the biggest single market by a wide margin, with about one-third of the $411 billion in 2015 global staffing revenue (temporary staffing along with place & search), but Europe remains the largest region. Focusing purely on temporary staffing, engineering makes up $26.4 billion of the $360.9 billion global market, or 7.3%. North America ($9.1 billion), Europe ($10.3 billion) and Asia Pacific ($5.5 billion) constitute the vast majority, with Africa & Middle East and Latin America adding to the total more modestly.
Growth in the global engineering sector has of course been tempered by the oil price decline with Brent Crude prices recently falling below $30 per barrel for the first time in 12 years. Given the turbulence within the oil and gas market in particular, delegates at our recent Executive Forum conference in Phoenix, Ariz., were divided on their long-term forecast for the sub-sector.
During the Research Live session, audience members were asked to vote on a series of other key strategic issues in the industry including a forecast for the oil and gas staffing market, and results were immediately compared with Staffing Industry Analysts’ own predictions. When asked about the outlook for staffing in the oil and gas sector 10 years from now, delegates were given a range of responses from significant market decline to significant market growth. The highest proportion of delegates, 35%, thought that the market would experience modest growth, an opinion the SIA research team would agree with. However the split in responses was particularly illustrative of the uncertainty in the sector at the moment.
Stay tuned for the next update to our US staffing industry forecast, due in April. Not only will we provide our latest thoughts on the industry’s growth prospects along with our revised estimates for 2015 and 2016, we will introduce our preliminary projections for 2017 as well. Considering the more complex global macroeconomic picture today relative to that of our last update in September 2015, this may well turn out to be among the more significant forecast revisions we have issued in recent years.
