Knowledge Worker Pool is The Next New Strategic Wealth Bigger than Data and Oil Economy

The world has changed a lot after the Covid-19 pandemic, a deadly killer airborne virus that completely shut down all human activities and their movement. We can also view the world order as before the 2020 pre-pandemic and post-pandemic levels. Human civilization has not seen the shutdown of such a massive scale across industries, across the nation. It was like the planet earth was doing its ritual of salvation after thousands of years of illegal human activity.

The good news was modern human civilization is so advanced that we learned to deal with most challenges that are natural, cyclic, and manmade.?But despite winning those challenges we are constantly seeing the disruption across all economic activities where global geopolitical activities are helping to fuel more severity. The biggest disruption after the post-pandemic was the huge demand for goods, services, and energy distribution.

The demand for goods and services broke the capacity of the digital infrastructure, manufacturing, supply chain, and logistics. But instead, companies are failing to meet service and production demand due to the huge gap between the skilled workforce, job openings, and employers seeking the right job candidates.?People became unemployed due to the pandemic where many are forced to leave their job because they cannot be done remotely and few managed to survive because their job adopted remote working capabilities. But things don’t stop here as more and more knowledge workers have joined the “Great Resignation” movement which is hurting the service industry most.?Now, what fuelled the great resignation movement? To trace the root cause we must go back 5 years from 2020.

The fact we must not forget is that we humans love to move from place to place whether it is for food, shelter, ease of living, medical, travel, jobs, education, business, or for no specific reasons at all. It is human nature to roam around the planet earth from place to place in search of anything. Now linking this fact to modern civilization the freedom of movement and settlement was restricted mainly by political agenda and motives that are fueled by nationalism and patriotism globally during 2015-2020.

Powerful elected leaders and policymakers thought immigrants will take over most economic opportunities which will challenge locals to grow. Yes, it's right when we see it very straight but to do so they must be disconnected from the globalization network and remain in complete isolation. But this is an impossible step that leads to suicidal economic outcomes in long run. This is exactly the first major reason why powerful nations are feeling disruption in their economy. The only select few countries that are highly focused on welcoming a pool of knowledge workers after the post-pandemic are Portugal, and UAE which are very serious to capture the new strategic wealth.

Now the next major reason for not finding a knowledge worker is the progress of rapid development in third-world nations. There is a rush and competition in developing silicon valleys like cities in third-world nations where they are becoming more ideal substitutes for real silicon valley and are known as regional silicon valleys. As the nation progresses many businesses will attract talent locally by offering attractive salaries and benefits that in some cases are higher than developed nations. As the development progresses the third-world nations will absorb significant talents locally with competing facilities than abroad.

There are other least noticed but strategically concerning reasons for the worldwide talent gap because countries like India, China, South East Asia, South Korea, the LATAM region, the Middle East, and Africa are growing rapidly meeting trillions of dollars in combined economy milestones ahead of time. When the economy grows on such a scale the demand for workers and talents will naturally be consumed locally. This is a huge setback for the developed nation if they don’t carefully and cleverly attract foreign talents by levering their developed nation's status which is the only key differentiator factor that brings high success.

Yes but yet not having achieved so much infrastructure development how people living there are making their modest ends meet. For this to happen we must thank the Internet technology, its inventor, and thousands of other computer scientists and investors who help mature and risk widespread affordability of the technology throughout the world. When it comes to the internet then its major components are bandwidth speed, reliability, usability, and accessibility. The blend of all these essential components of the internet has given rise to countless local innovations where millions of entrepreneurs were born between 2010 and 2020 and thrived locally serving plentiful domestic needs. The demand for goods and services via internet platforms saw exponential growth almost in every country during the covid pandemic. Skilled talents and graduates are preferring to stay home countries because of many local entrepreneurship opportunities.

Soon, the demand for workforce and talent will even grow larger in rich nations. The major reasons are the declining rate of graduation among locals, global imbalance in power-sharing, geopolitical activities, rising inflation, rising hate crimes, higher taxes, complex health care & claims, and the cost of living becoming unaffordable in rich nations than in developing nations.

When the freedom of movement is acted wisely from place to place it can reactivate, revitalize, and makes the economy lively with diversity and inclusions. To do so policymakers, stakeholders, and corporations must rethink and come up with more flexible broad opportunities that help narrow the gap in supply and demand of talent and jobs.

To solve the major problem of the widening gap between skill, talent, and job opportunities technology plays a crucial role. Although there are many local and global technology platforms to connect job seekers with employers still there is a huge demand for the right technology that solves problems with more accuracy and reliability as millions of people every year enter the job market globally. Matching each candidate with the right employer locally and globally is a huge technical challenge but not impossible to act. Continuous innovation, investment, the right tech implementation, and the right mindset will help reduce the gap between job seekers and employers.