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Decoding industrial talent: What the industrial goods workforce wants

As part of our Global Talent Survey, 16,000 workers from the industrial goods sector shared their attitudes about remote work, job change and their ideal workplace.

What is the Global Talent Survey?

The Global Talent Survey (GTS) is a piece of research conducted every four years by Totaljobs, as a founding member of The Network (an alliance of market leading job boards in over 130 countries) and with Boston Consulting Group (one of the world’s leading management consultancies).

Gathering insights from over 208,000 workers worldwide (16,000 employees across the industrial goods industry) this landmark series is the largest workforce trend study in the world.

You can explore other findings from our Global Talent Series here.

Key report findings from ‘What the industrial goods workforce wants’

The industrial goods industry is under pressure.

Many companies are racing towards digital transformation to modernise, while facing growing pressure to operate more sustainably to address climate change issues.

On top of this, the past few years have brought a raft of new challenges to navigate, including: a declining interest in relocation for work, competition for new hires in in-demand skills and shifting employee expectations.

Despite these challenges, both manual and degree-educated workers have emerged with a renewed desire to upskill, progress in their career, and to work for companies that share their beliefs and values.

Findings from our Global Talent Survey (consisting of 16,000 workers from the industrial goods industry) highlight the ways employers can best address these challenges and meet the shifting preferences of the industrial goods workforce, entrenching themselves as employers of choice for the years ahead.

A workforce hit hard by the pandemic

More employees of industrial goods companies lost jobs or had their work hours cut during the Covid-19 crisis than in almost any other industry except for travel and tourism, media, and professional services.

The most effected were manual laborers in such industries as manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and logistics. More than one in five (21%) of these workers were laid off, and another 20% had their hours cut.

Degree-educated workers in the industry (including engineers, scientists, managers, and other degree-levels professionals) were also affected, though not as severely. 14% of these professionals were laid off and 17% had their hours cut.

The pandemic has a direct effect on employees’ feelings about work, as indicated by key measures of workplace sentiment. Feelings about their own well-being, work-life balance, and effectiveness declined. Satisfaction with the quality and style of their organisations’ leadership and with team collaboration also fell significantly.

A massive shift in workplace preferences

Industrial goods employees were were forced to embrace new ways of working during the pandemic, and the change has affected how they want to work in the future.

More than half (55%) of the industry’s degree-educated employees now want to work remotely two or three days a week. In addition, 70% of manual workers would prefer to work remotely at least some of the time, though the reality of offering such an arrangement could vary widely by industry and role.

The pandemic also changed the aspects of work that industrial goods worker value the most. Maintaining good work relationships and a good work-life balance became more important. Maintaining a solid relationship with a superior also increased in importance during the pandemic for workers of all types.

Interest in virtual international jobs increases

55% of industrial goods workers say they would consider working virtually for an employer based in a different country or region. In particular, remote roles for German, American, Australian, and Canadian companies ranked the most popular.

Fewer employees are keen to physically move to a different region for a work opportunity, continuing a decline we’ve tracked since our first global talent survey, in 2014. Just 50% of the industrial goods workforce was willing to move abroad for work in 2020, compared with 67% in 2014. Germany is the top destination for an overseas assignment for industrial goods workers, and other top locations include Canada, the US, Australia, and Japan.

Industrial workers are eager to learn

Industrial goods workers are concerned of the increased threat that automation poses to their livelihoods and are willing to reskill or upskill as a result. Of the total workforce, 45% of manual workers and 39% of degree-educated workers said that the issue of having their jobs automated or replaced by robotics became more important in the past year. And 69% are willing to retrain, slightly higher than the average for jobs across all industries.

Early and mid career employees are more willing than most to reskill, possibly because they have more years left on the job than older workers during which they could put new skills to use. Industrial goods employees in Africa and the Middle East are more willing to spend time learning new skills than respondents from Europe and America.

60% of industrial goods workers average at least a few weeks a year to training. Only 56% of manual workers in the industry spend that amount of time a year on training, the lowest portion for any industry we surveyed. The low participation in training could potentially be the result of industrial goods companies focusing their training on health, safety, and environmental issues rather than upskilling.

When they learn new skills for their existing position or reskill for a new one, industrial goods workers want to learn online, a common trend across all the industries we studied.

Tips to attract and retain the industrial goods talent

Industrial goods companies accelerated their transition to digital during the pandemic to accommodate new ways of working. Now they must figure out how to make the changes permanent in a way that works for both the business and a divergent workforce. Among other things, they can:

Develop a strategic workforce plan.
Provide flexibility in a way that works for employees of all types as well as the business, including rethinking shift-work schedules for manual workers.
Consider new workforce sources, including recruiting people who would be willing to work remotely from a different region.
Cultivate an environment that contributes to good relationships between supervisors and their direct reports and among coworkers, two aspects of work that we know are important to both knowledge workers and frontline personnel.

Industrial goods companies can consider the changing preferences of their workforce to strengthen their value proposition and attract new talent for the road ahead.