The Growing Gap Between Winners and Losers is the New Global Challenge

I don't work in Human Resources, but often promote different positions among my peers and in social media. And that's why I know how difficult it is to find a well-qualified worker in Ukraine, especially for a foreign company or organization.

It doesn't mean there are no applications. The country found itself in a paradoxical situation, where the market is full of those hunting for a job, but hiring a professional is a very difficult task for employers to accomplish (including positions of the state management).

My latest interaction with eventual applicants included CVs of a “Korrespondent”, a person from “Krimea” and a girl who proposed to read her love dramas to be recommended to global humanitarian organization. I've got dozens of such examples, but the issue is not only about post-Soviet English.

The global labor market has faced fundamental transformations in recent years. With the growing migration crisis and political shakes like Brexit, far right movement raising and challenging ideas of Trumponomics, some political leaders promote squeezing markets of employment to national idea by promising in such a way to raise amount of jobs and restore national economics.

However, whatever the far right politicians would say the good old bourgeoisie of 1920-30s is not gonna be restored. The global transition to cosmopolitan market is too strong already to step it back and is not the reason of high rates of unemployment.

The European Company Survey in 2013, indicated that around 39% of employers faced difficulties recruiting stuff because of skills shortages. In 2014, despite high unemployment, there were still two million vacancies in the European economy that were hard to fulfill because of this issue. Due to the Manpower Talent surveys in 2014, over half of the global employers stated that talent shortages significantly impact their ability to meet client needs.

In this issue, Ukraine appeared to be close to Europe. The latest World Bank research indicates “while the country demonstrates a strong record of educational attainment and acquisition of foundational skills, the post-secondary education and training system fails to equip workers with the right advanced skills for labor market success.”

This all means that a diploma does not guarantee any more that graduates perform well in the workplace and that the acceleration of progress changes the rules of labor market and influences every country.

Upcoming digital revolution has already increased huge distance between those who own old-school education and those who earned skills of newly presented modernity. Nowadays, experience concedes the ability to think fast and look for creative solutions. Greatly promoted motto “The Winner Takes it all!” increased the gap between winners and losers.

Often, while blaming technological progress we avoid the fact that it is not the only factor bringing changes. RalfFücks, President of Heinrich Böll Foundation, speaking at Brookings in early May, brought to light other fundamental impacts: “We have experienced a dramatic cultural revolution in gender relations and in family model, the decline of the patriarchal family model, there is a crisis of male identity, and we are at the beginning of the digital revolution that will change fundamentally not only our economies.”

Fücks insists that all these transformations led to polarization between winners and losers and this is one of the core problems ignored for a long time by the global community.

We are confronted with inseparability of social and economic impacts that change the labor markets all over the world. Nowadays, success in the labor market depends on the socio-emotional skills as much as on cognitive and technical talents. New cultural revolution brings enormous pressure on the society by transforming the social roles. That is why to overcome the growing gap between “winners and losers”, together with improving education, communication between employers and educational centers, we have to rethink the new cultural dimension and after this start restoring equal opportunities for everyone.