Welcome to a truly global market for talent

In the past, location was a factor in attracting and accessing talent. Top talent always has a choice and, in the past, often exercised it by preferring to move to attractive city locations. People who were not mobile would not be considered for some roles.

it looks like that’s set to change. Organisations are more open to a distributed workforce and individuals may prefer to work remotely or may not need or want to commute or move house to cities to meet their career goals.

These trends will broaden the market of opportunities available to top talent. They will no longer be limited by mobility, family considerations or schooling options. As a result, we can expect that competition for the best people will intensify.

It is the same for the best suppliers. In the past we sometimes lost work because, although we have people around the world, we don’t have an office in every city. Companies in markets like Australia were often reluctant to work with training suppliers who were not in Australia. This makes sense when travel costs are a huge part of any project they agree with an international supplier. At the beginning of this year a potential US customer for a global webinar delivered programme decided to go with a local supplier “because they had an office in our city.”

Since the lockdown this has changed markedly. Organisations realise they will rarely, if ever, be getting face to face with their suppliers in the short to medium term future, and location is becoming less of an issue. This has been common in Europe for some time. In most sales interactions there is little expectation by our clients that they need to get face to face. However, it seemed to be less accepted in the USA and Asia before the pandemic.

Today trainers based in Europe can deliver webinars early in the morning to Asia and later in the evening to the USA. Where they are based becomes unimportant. Trainers based in Asia and the USA can offer the same flexibility. This gives us much more choice and flexible capacity. The deciding factors for clients are the quality of the content and the ability of the facilitator to create engagement and interaction, not where they happen to work from.

Now expand this on a global scale. Any organisation with access to the Internet can access the world’s best talent and the world’s best suppliers, irrespective of location .

We expect this will lead to a polarised market with the absolute top global talent and top global suppliers taking a disproportionate share of the benefits. It is no time to be average or a generalist dabbling in a subject when companies have much more choice and can go straight to the global leaders.

It also means that both individuals and suppliers need to have strong virtual delivery capability to access this market and compete effectively.

We welcome the elimination of barriers to doing business globally, we know it will increase competition in our existing markets too but that’s healthy and will keep us learning. So far we are seeing our new business pipeline up over 60% on last year so we see to be benefiting from this trend.

Find out more about our  learning path and bite sized training modules for people working remotely.