Many challenges have affected the labor market, and 2023 could be potentially worse. This is caused by global economic downturns, shrinking investment in businesses, and ongoing market adaptation to the impact of COVID-19 and the Ukraine-Russia war in 2022.
The International Monetary Fund predicts economic growth decelerating to 2.75% in 2023 compared to 3.2% in 2022 and 6.0 in 2021. The forecast for Nigeria is not much better, with the growth tempo declining from 3.2% in 2022 to 3.0% in 2023. This urgently needs the attention of the Nigerian labor market as they need to realign its 2023 priorities.
With these negative economic trends, employers will likely reduce the concentration of employee centricity in corporate culture and prospective employees will turn from job hoppers into job seekers again. With that happening, experienced staff will be treated with more consideration, while entry-level employees may find themselves successively redundant.
Notwithstanding, these are the 2023 labor market trends for employers and employees to look out for in the quest to remain competitive amidst the market shockwaves.
2023 labor market trends for employers and employees
- Employee Value Proposition: To shield themselves from the avoidable costs of hiring unsuitable candidates and attract talents that will contribute to business sustainability, employers will expectedly pay more attention to their employee value proposition. Organizations need to be transparent about their intrinsic benefits and hold themselves accountable for growth prospects.
- Demand for upskilling: With professionally designed and implemented upskilling programs, employers will avoid increased spend on recruitment and losing high-performing talents to competitors.
- Data-drive HR management: This approach will probably lead to an increased demand for HR software adoption in the workplace. Therefore, HR managers must resort to external labor market analysts to stay the course of developing trends in the long term to plan employee reskilling accordingly.
- Workforce rationalization: This will require employers and employees to remain alert and have backup plans in stock in case of being left or laid off.
- Digital and hybrid recruitment: Digital and hybrid recruitment services will do half of the work, giving HR personnel more room to concentrate on strategic tasks and focus on talent management instead of sourcing and screening.
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