A new approach to Europe's skills shortage
An ageing population and other demographic issues could lead to a skills shortage in Europe. One solution may be attracting skilled professionals from India, an option investigated by the three-member project EU COMPETITIVENESS (Enhancing European competitiveness by leveraging highly skilled Indian professionals). The project looked at different strategies to attract Indian professionals to Europe. It began by documenting Indian employment expectations with the aim of disseminating these findings to industry, in addition to quantifying the possible benefits of Indian talent for Europe. The project's main idea revolved around the concept of psychological contract, meaning beliefs, perceptions and informal obligations between employer and employee. In this vein, the project team outlined parameters of psychological contracts and developed some instruments to measure these contracts. It also undertook measurement of contracts in order to obtain a fuller picture on employer-employee dynamics. While the idea was a very good one, the project could not complete its work due to the withdrawal of some consortium members. The project team had initially aimed to analyse human resource management (HRM) policies in western Europe, frame future HRM policies and develop toolkits to implement new policies in organisations. These parts of the project were not realised, but pave the way for future projects to perhaps develop the idea and pursue this avenue for raising competitiveness in Europe. During the course of the project the team published one paper on the topic in a relevant journal and conducted conference presentations. These might prove useful in other initiatives on the same topic.
Keywords
Skills shortage, Indian professionals, EU COMPETITIVENESS, psychological contract, human resources management
