KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 17): Employers, especially in technical and engineering industries, are concerned over talent shortage due to professionals expecting higher remunerations to cover rising living costs, according to Robert Walters Salary Survey 2023.
The professional recruitment consultancy said its latest annual salary survey has revealed that 60% of employers in Malaysia might possibly struggle to retain their top talent, as 48% of professionals are expecting salary increments in response to the rising cost of living.
In a statement, Robert Walters country head for Malaysia Ai Rene Tan said employers will need to align with employees’ sentiments to retain top talent as 60% of the respondents are looking to change jobs this year.
“Based on the overall findings of the survey, job movers will likely garner salary rises of 15% to 20%. There may be increments of up to 30% for talent with niche skill sets. With inflationary trends set to continue in 2023, professionals are expected to have higher salary demands,” Tan said.
The survey also showed that 73% of organisations have actively implemented various retention programmes in the past year with the top three initiatives being improved learning and development (68%), increased wellbeing initiatives (65%) and hybrid work policy (58%).
Tan said that hybrid skills will continue to be in high demand as companies have observed the need to move beyond technical competencies and look for skills to effectively partner with their businesses.
She said professionals with strong stakeholder management, sharp business acumen and data analytical skills will be highly sought after.
“From a macro perspective, in 2023, organisations will continue to automate and modernise their business processes by adapting to new technologies. Automation will drive growth and hiring demand in shared services centres across functions such as human resources, finance and IT will increase,” Tan said.
Robert Walters said the pandemic situation, which accelerated technological transformation across many industries, has also exacerbated the shortage of skilled talent, especially an all-time high demand in the technology and transformation, engineering and manufacturing, and human resources sectors.
“To bridge the skills mismatch resulting from the pandemic, 88% of organisations are reskilling existing employees to cope with new challenges at work. More than half of the organisations (54%) have rolled out internal reskilling programmes to help close the skills gap and enhance employees’ competitiveness within the industry,” the firm said.
The firm believes the engineering and manufacturing sector will see favourable hiring activities with the resumption of manufacturing operations, propelling the need for strong talent across all functions to enable plant readiness.
“This is most notable in the northern region, where manufacturing companies increased their footprints in 2022,” it wrote.
Robert Walters said the key industries covered in the 24th iteration of the survey in Malaysia are accounting and finance, banking and financial services, engineering and manufacturing, human resources, legal and corporate secretarial, sales and marketing, supply chain, procurement and logistics, and technology and transformation.