The Coming Shortage of Workers, Not Jobs

For most of the past half-century, the economic worry in wealthy countries was a shortage of jobs. The next few decades look different. As populations age, the constraint is shifting to a shortage of workers: fewer people of working age supporting more people in retirement, and employers competing harder for the skills they need. This is not a forecast about a single bad year. It is a structural change, and it will shape how businesses hire for a long time.

This essay looks at what the evidence says, then asks a narrower question: what can hiring across borders actually do about it, and what can it not?

What the Demographic Numbers Say

The OECD's Employment Outlook 2025 (opens in a new tab) puts the problem plainly. Labour markets are resilient today, with employment rates at record highs in many member countries, but population ageing is set to lead to significant labour shortages. Its projections include:

• The working-age population across the OECD declining by 8% by 2060, and by more than 30% in a quarter of member countries.
• The old-age dependency ratio, people aged 65 and over relative to the working-age population, rising from 31% in 2023 to 52% by 2060, up from 19% in 1980.
• Without decisive policy action, GDP per capita growth slowing by about two-fifths, from 1% a year in 2006–19 to 0.6% a year in 2024–60 on average.

The OECD's proposed responses are mostly domestic: keeping older workers in work for longer, bringing more women and young people into the labour market, and reviving productivity, including through AI. Those matter, and none of them is quick.

Shortages Are About Skills as Well as Numbers

Headcount is only half the picture. Employers do not need workers in general; they need people who can do specific jobs.

The UK's Employer Skills Survey 2024 (opens in a new tab) found that just over a quarter (27%) of all vacancies were skill-shortage vacancies, meaning hard to fill because applicants lacked the skills, qualifications or experience required. That was down from 36% in 2022 but above the 22% recorded in 2017. Separately, 12% of employers had at least one member of staff who was not fully proficient in their role.

Read together, the two sources describe a squeeze from both sides. Fewer people are entering the working-age population in many ageing economies, and a meaningful share of the vacancies that do exist are hard to fill for want of the right skills. Cyclical changes in hiring will move the numbers up and down. The underlying direction does not change with them.

What Distributed Hiring Can Help With

Much of the world's working-age growth is happening outside the ageing economies. We have covered the African side of that picture in what global employers should know about Africa's growing workforce, so we will not repeat the figures here. The point for employers is that, for a growing set of roles, the talent pool no longer has to be local.

• Location-independent roles. Work that happens on a screen, such as finance operations, customer support, sales development, marketing, design, data and software, can be done well from another country when the hours, language and management fit.
• Hard-to-fill skills. A role that attracts few qualified local applicants may have a deeper pool elsewhere.
• Capacity without permanent headcount. For businesses that cannot predict growth, adding dedicated professionals on a rolling basis can be more practical than a long local recruitment cycle.
• Freeing scarce local people. When routine-but-skilled work moves to a dedicated remote professional, the people you already have can spend more time on work that does need them in person.

This is the part of the problem Remoteli works on. Our Services cover 38 roles across eight services, and every one of them can be done remotely by design.

What It Cannot Solve

Honesty matters here, because overselling remote hiring helps nobody.

• Work that needs hands and presence. Care, construction, hospitality, logistics and much of healthcare cannot be done from another continent. Many of the most acute shortages are in exactly these jobs.
• Under-investment in skills. Hiring abroad does not remove the need to train people at home. A business that only ever buys skills, and never builds them, stays exposed.
• A poorly designed role. If a job is hard to fill because the hours, pay or management are unattractive, widening the search simply finds the problem faster.
• Weak management of distributed teams. Remote professionals need clear briefs, regular feedback and real inclusion in the team. Without that, distance amplifies every problem.

Distributed hiring is one response among several. It works best alongside the domestic measures the OECD describes, not instead of them.

A Longer View

There is a way of talking about global hiring that treats it as an emergency valve: open it when local hiring is hard, close it when things ease. We think that misreads the moment. If the constraint on growth is increasingly access to people with the right skills, then the ability to find, engage and work well with professionals wherever they are becomes a lasting capability, something a business builds deliberately, like a sales function or a finance team.

There is also a human side to the arithmetic. The same demographic shift that leaves ageing economies short of workers leaves younger ones needing more good jobs than their local economies currently create. Connecting the two, fairly and on good terms for both sides, is the reason Remoteli exists, and it underpins our mission to create one million employment opportunities across Africa. Our Impact page sets out how we approach it, and the essay on why to hire for capability, not location makes the case from the employer's side.