The healthcare, science and engineering sector have problems finding people with the right skills as a clear mismatch between supply and demand continues to haunt the European and US labour markets with workers often failing to fit the bill, Randstad said in a new report.

The report ‘Into the Gap’, launched yesterday in Brussels during a seminar at the Permanent Representation of the Netherlands to the EU, looks at the widening talent and job shortages in the future and Randstad CEO, Ben Noteboom, said that “finding people with the right skills is increasingly difficult in a constantly changing world.

“We see discrepancies between the educational choices people make and the needs of the labour market, influenced by globalization and technological developments. Some traditional industries like agriculture or manufacturing continue to diminish and will have less jobs available”.

“But people working in these industries will not immediately have the right set of skills to be able to work in emerging sectors such as IT and healthcare. Closing this gap will benefit employers, employees and society as a whole,” he said.

The report predicts that there will be a “potential employment gap” of 25 million workers in the EU for 2050. It also found that three out of five jobs are matched correctly in terms of level of education in both Europe and the US and that there is a surplus of workers in manufacturing.

The report argues that mismatches occur when people are either under or overqualified for a job or if their field of studies and experience do not match the developments in the labour market.

To mend the problem, it urges policy makers to “take a fresh look at employment protection regulation, unemployment benefits, training on the job and pensions. Read the whole report here.”

To read the full report, click here.