The growth of online consumer spending is causing a shortage of qualified staff at e-commerce companies. More than half of employers expect hard-to-fill vacancies in the next six months. Especially in the e-spply chain management job area, finding good staff is proving challenging.
This is according to research among Thuiswinkel.org members commissioned by the Human Capital Table Logistics. Currently, 125,000 people are employed in the Dutch e-commerce industry. Over 7,800 new employees were sought in the past six months alone. The employees surveyed expect this number to rise further in the near future. Striking is the high demand for higher educated people: 77 per cent of the vacancies are hbo+.
To fill the shortage, four in 10 employers hire people with less work experience in the field and provide further training on the job. However, three in 10 employers are not willing to adjust job requirements, so they intensify recruitment efforts. 22 per cent of these employers recruit internationally.
According to Top Sector Logistics, the shortage can be addressed by accelerating the expansion of training courses with e-commerce competences. The current outflow of training courses would not be enough to meet the needs of the business sector. "The pool of qualified personnel is too small to meet all the demand. Partly for this reason, the accelerated transformation of curricula in higher education and the retraining of incumbent staff is of great importance," Top Sector Logistics writes in response to the study.
The qualifications of incumbent staff are also said to have some shortcomings. More than two-thirds of employers experience shortcomings in the skills of their current staff, including both professional e-commerce skills, digital skills and more generic competences. The value placed on soft skills is striking. "The increasingly applied flexible, 'agile' forms of work require competences in the areas of collaboration, initiative and energy. The rapid developments within the e-commerce sector require more continuous development of employees. This deserves more attention from both the organisation and the individual professional," said Top Sector Logistics.
The full report can be downloaded here.
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