Talent Gap: Ten-Year Employment Trends, Costs, and Global Implications

Globally, a gap between the demand for project management skills and the availability of talent continues to persist. This opens up a host of new job opportunities in project management-oriented employment (PMOE) for project professionals and all changemakers – those who, regardless of their role, are inspired and equipped to drive change.

PMI identifies three reasons for the persistence of the talent gap.

• An increase in the number of jobs requiring project management-oriented skills
• Higher demand for project professionals in emerging and developing countries due to economic growth
• The rate of retirement from the workforce

The global economy needs 25 million new project professionals by 2030. To close the talent gap, 2.3 million people will need to enter PMOE every year just to keep up with demand – this includes project managers and all changemakers.

Talent Gap: Ten-Year Employment Trends, Costs, and Global Implications 2021 is the fourth assessment of project management employment and industry activity conducted for PMI by the Anderson Economic Group (AEG).

To understand the size and growth of the project management-oriented profession, analysis was conducted of PMI regions. Regional data in the report was modeled on selected countries, factoring data from other countries in the regions. Asia Pacific (Indonesia, Japan), China (Mainland China), Europe (Germany, United Kingdom), Latin America (Brazil, Colombia), MENA (Egypt, Saudi Arabia), North America (Canada, United States), Sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa, Nigeria), and South Asia (India).