Top Consultant has just released their annual recruitment channel report,and it’s a particularly interesting read for the project management industry too. Project management features as a functional area within management consultancy and with the MC industry suffering the same downturn as other industry sectors in the UK we can also draw some direct parallels to what we’re seeing within the project management industry.
“Over the last 12 months the sales pipelines of firms both big and small have shortened significantly. Some firms have just a few weeks work booked rather than several months despite firms significantly dropping the minimum project size thresholds they would have pursued in years past” Recruitment Channel Report 2009
Subsequently the MC industry has seen a decrease in hiring requirements by up to 50%, although 24% expect to make more hires than they did the previous year. The report also looks at the industry sectors which are more likely to be making those hires; Public Sector, Healthcare & Pharma, Energy & Utilities and Purchasing & Supply Chain. No surprises there as the sectors highlighted are most likely to be recession proof. The project management recruitment activity within MC is much more likely to occur during 2009 and this is down to the outcome that organisations are looking for in their dealings with consultancy organisations – increased profit.
It seems that consulting firms are being forced to focus on pitching for work that has a payback of less than 12 months as clients want spend to be profit enhancing or profit neutral within the current fianancial year
The quote goes on to say:
“So strategy work is much harder to sell; restructuring / change projects are on a stronger footing”
This means that business process improvement, IT/Software development and project / programme management are the likely areas to see increased recruitment activity within the management consultancy industry. In the Arras People annual benchmark we also saw the significant personal confidence of change managers has they headed into 2009 due to the types of programmes and projects that would feature in these difficult times.
One area which does differ between the management consultancy and project management industry is rentention rates. In the MC industry, staff attrition (the number of staff leaving an organisation) is roughly 10%, with the expectation that this will worsen through 2009. Many consultants see themselves moving on to other consulting organisations due to “Career prospects being more promising elsewhere” (50%), “Dissatisfaction with excessive travelling” (35%) and “Better renumeration elsewhere” (32%). In the project management world 34% will be moving on to work for a new employer in 2009 but the main driving force was due to redundancy (26%), increase in challenge (21.5%) and better prospects (21.5%). At the moment attrition, in the project management industry, is not being instigated by the employee but the employing organisation as redundancy levels increase.
In an article I’ve recently written for the APM Project magazine (due out in May) there is also a reduced take up in newly qualified or entry level roles in project management. This is also the case in the MC world, as clients are demanding an increase in quality of services which they believe only experienced consultants can deliver. This drive away from the newly qualified professional means potentially in the MC world there will be a shortage of talent at this level in the future, but does this present a potential issue for the project management world?
I would be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on this issue - would the project management world in the future be at a disadvantage if we stop hiring the newly qualified and less skilled project managers now?
