Tallinn, September 2023
Employers are struggling to hire like never before, and the reason is not the one most people assume. The roles going unfilled are not held up only by a shortage of coders or engineers. Again and again, what employers say they cannot find is something more fundamental and far harder to pin down: people who can communicate clearly, work well with others, think critically, solve problems, and adapt when the ground shifts.
This is the talent shortage with a human face — and as the workforce heads into 2024, it is becoming the defining hiring challenge of the decade. According to Ewance — a challenge-based learning platform where students solve real-world challenges tied to their field of study — the gap between the durable, human skills employers want and the credentials the education system produces is widening, not closing.
A shortage at a 17-year high
The scale is striking. ManpowerGroup's 2023 Talent Shortage survey, drawn from nearly 39,000 employers across 41 countries, finds that 77% of employers report difficulty filling roles — a 17-year high. The difficulty is global: 82% of employers in Asia Pacific report trouble, 79% in North America, 77% across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and 72% in Central and South America.
Crucially, when employers are asked what they are actually short of, the answer is not a list of technical certifications. The most in-demand soft skills they name are reliability and self-discipline; resilience and adaptability; critical thinking and analysis; creativity and originality; and reasoning and problem-solving. The hardest gap to fill is a human one.
We keep describing this as a 'skills shortage' as if the missing ingredient were another software package. It isn't. Employers are telling us, in survey after survey, that they can teach the tools. What they can't easily find is judgment, adaptability, and the ability to work well with other people.
— Ewance's founder
So what exactly are employers missing?
The pattern repeats wherever you look. On LinkedIn, the most in-demand skills heading into 2024 are dominated by people skills: management, communication, customer service, leadership and sales top the list, and human-centred skills make up seven of the ten most sought-after capabilities overall.
Employers hiring graduates say the same thing. In NACE's Job Outlook 2023 survey, more than six in ten employers report seeking evidence of a candidate's ability to solve problems and to work in a team — ahead of most technical requirements — with at least half also looking for a strong work ethic, analytical and quantitative skills, and written communication. The message to graduates is unambiguous: show us you can think and collaborate, not just that you passed the module.
The future of work is doubling down on human skills
Far from making these capabilities obsolete, the arrival of powerful new technology is raising their value. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2023 finds that analytical thinking is the single most important core skill for employers, with creative thinking close behind in second. The skills businesses say are growing in importance fastest are overwhelmingly human: curiosity and lifelong learning; resilience, flexibility and agility; and motivation and self-awareness round out the top five.
The trajectory is clear. The WEF reports that employers expect demand for creative thinking to grow by 73% over the next five years — faster even than demand for analytical thinking — and that analytical and creative thinking are the top two priorities for workforce training between now and 2027. As machines absorb more routine work, the premium shifts to the things only people do well.
There's a comforting myth that technology will make human skills less relevant. The data says the opposite. The more capable the tools become, the more an organisation's edge depends on the human judgment guiding them. Durable skills are appreciating assets, not relics.
— Ewance's founder
If everyone agrees they matter, why are they so scarce?
Here is the puzzle: there is near-universal consensus that these skills are essential, and yet employers say they cannot find enough of them. Part of the answer is that the demand is enormous and longstanding. An analysis of 82 million job postings by America Succeeds, with Emsi Burning Glass, found that seven of the ten most-requested skills in job postings are "durable skills" — the human and character capabilities, such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration and leadership, that hold their value as technologies change.
The deeper answer is that the education system is not optimised to build them. Much of formal learning still rewards what is easiest to measure — recall of content, performance on a timed exam — rather than the messy, collaborative, real-world practice through which durable skills actually develop. We test what is convenient to test, and durable skills are not convenient.
The proof problem
Even where these skills exist, there is a second, quieter obstacle: they are extraordinarily hard to prove. A transcript can certify that a student passed organic chemistry. It cannot certify that they can lead a team through a setback, communicate under pressure, or adapt a plan when the brief changes overnight.
That leaves employers guessing. Interviews are noisy and easy to coach for; a degree title says little about how someone works. The result is a market where the most valuable skills are also the least visible — and where both employers and graduates lose.
This is the heart of the problem. It isn't only that durable skills are hard to teach. It's that they're hard to see. If you can't demonstrate adaptability or problem-solving in a way an employer can trust, having the skill and not having it can look identical on paper.
— Ewance's founder
Can you teach a durable skill in a lecture hall?
The honest answer is: not easily. Resilience is not absorbed from a slide. Collaboration is not learned by reading about teamwork. Problem-solving develops by grappling with problems that do not have a clean answer in the back of the book. These are capabilities forged in the doing — which is precisely why the conventional, content-delivery model of education struggles to produce them at scale.
The implication for 2024 is that closing the durable-skills gap will require changing not just what students learn, but how they practise it — and how they prove it.
So what actually builds them — and proves them?
If durable skills are forged in the doing, the fix has to put students in the doing — which is the premise Ewance was built on. Launched in 2023, it runs challenge-based projects with university students: open-ended, real-world problems tied to their field, the kind that demand communication, judgment and adaptability rather than recall — and that leave a visible trail of how a student actually worked.
That dual outcome — building the skills and making them provable — is the point. Ewance's founder has spent more than a decade at the intersection of education and industry, and the durable-skills gap is the one that shows up most consistently in the room, from the students doing the work to the recruiters trying to hire for it.
You don't build resilience or collaboration with a lecture about them — you build them by handing people a hard, real problem and the room to work it. Do that, and you solve both halves at once: the skills get built, and they finally become something an employer can see.
— Ewance's founder
Recommendations
Ewance's founder offered the following for students, graduates, and the institutions preparing them:
- Treat durable skills as the core curriculum, not the extras. Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are what the market is short of — and what it pays for.
- Practise in the open. These skills grow through real, messy challenges, not through lectures about them.
- Make them visible. A skill an employer can see demonstrated is worth far more than one a graduate merely claims.
- Expect the premium to rise. As technology advances, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less — so invest accordingly.
The organisations winning the talent race in 2024 won't be the ones demanding ever-longer lists of technical credentials. They'll be the ones who learn to find — and develop — the human skills that machines can't replace. The challenge for education is to build those skills, and to make them provable. Right now we're failing at both.
— Ewance's founder
Sources
This release synthesises publicly available research published on or before September 2023; ManpowerGroup, WEF and LinkedIn data is multi-country/global, NACE and America Succeeds data US-based. Ewance conducted no proprietary survey for this release.
- ManpowerGroup, 2023 Talent Shortage survey — 77% of employers report difficulty filling roles, a 17-year high (≈39,000 employers across 41 countries); most in-demand soft skills: reliability & self-discipline, resilience & adaptability, critical thinking & analysis, creativity & originality, reasoning & problem-solving; regional difficulty Asia Pacific 82%, North America 79%, EMEA 77%, Central/South America 72%.
- World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2023 (May 2023) — analytical thinking the most important core skill, creative thinking second; fastest-rising skills include curiosity & lifelong learning, resilience/flexibility/agility, motivation/self-awareness; demand for creative thinking expected to grow 73% over five years; analytical and creative thinking the top two training priorities to 2027.
- NACE, Job Outlook 2023 (published November 2022) — more than six in ten employers seek evidence of problem-solving and teamwork on candidates' resumes; at least half also look for work ethic, analytical/quantitative skills, and written communication.
- America Succeeds with Emsi Burning Glass, "The High Demand for Durable Skills" (October 2021) — analysis of 82 million job postings finds seven of the ten most-requested skills are durable skills (e.g. critical thinking, communication, collaboration, leadership).
- LinkedIn, Most In-Demand Skills 2023 — led by management, communication, customer service, leadership and sales; people/soft skills make up seven of the top ten (LinkedIn platform data, not an independent survey).
