Talent shortage: industry must learn to develop what it can no longer hire

Brazilian industry is currently living with a real shortage of talent. Hiring qualified professionals has become more difficult, expensive and uncertain. However, the market alone cannot solve everything. In this case, part of the problem lies within the companies themselves, in the way they develop people, promote leaders and generate learning in that process. 

There are relevant data that help gauge the size of this challenge. According to the most recent Mapa do Trabalho Industrial (Industrial Work Map), prepared by Senai, Brazil will need to qualify around 14 million workers in industrial occupations between 2025 and 2027. Globally, ManpowerGroup's 2025 Talent Shortage Survey shows that 74% of companies have difficulty finding qualified professionals. In the Brazilian market, this figure reaches 81%. 

When the shortage is treated only as an external difficulty, the response tends to focus on recruitment, compensation and employer brand appeal. All of this matters. However, none of these fronts replaces the internal competence to turn experience into shared learning. Tacit knowledge into stable practice. And good professionals into consistent managers. 

This discussion gains weight at a time when digitalization, automation, artificial intelligence, data analytics and new work models are rapidly changing the demands placed on industrial organizations. 

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 points out that skills gaps are seen as the main barrier to business transformation by 63% of employers. The same report indicates that 85% of companies intend to prioritize upskilling their teams. For manufacturing, finding qualified people is no longer enough. It is necessary to create the conditions to develop competencies internally in a consistent way. 

The advent of artificial intelligence reinforces this urgency. It can expand analytical capacity, speed up access to information, automate repetitive activities and support decisions. However, its value depends, to a large extent, on the quality of the human system that uses it. Where method, clarity about the challenges, management discipline and learning are lacking, technology tends to amplify existing weaknesses as well. 

The global management agenda already clearly identifies this tension. Microsoft's Work Trend Index 2025 describes a growing capacity gap in organizations: 53% of leaders say productivity needs to increase, while 80% of the global workforce says they do not have enough time or energy to do their work. The pressure for performance is growing in an environment in which teams, processes and managers are often already operating at the limit. 

In industry, this pressure falls in a particular way on the middle levels. Supervisors, coordinators, cell leaders, foremen and first-line managers are at the “point” where strategy meets routine. It is up to them to translate goals into behavior, monitor standards, support teams, resolve deviations, absorb new technologies and preserve operational stability. When this level is poorly prepared, execution loses consistency precisely where it should be gaining strength. 

Over time, the habit of promoting the best technicians, operators or specialists as a form of recognition and retention has become entrenched in Brazilian industry. The decision seems logical at first glance. Those who deliver good operational results are valued, and the risk of losing that professional to the competition is reduced. The weakness appears when this transition occurs without adequate training, as if leading were a natural extension of good technical performance. 

Leadership requires a different kind of contribution. It involves developing teams, sustaining standards, removing obstacles, training successors and continuously improving the work system. An excellent technician can become a great manager, but this transition does not happen through a simple change of position. It depends on support, deliberate practice, progressive exposure to managerial responsibilities and clarity about what is expected of this new role. 

When promotion is done without this care, the company creates a “double loss.” It weakens a technical competence that was previously fully applied in operations and hands the management of people, processes and decisions to someone who has not yet been prepared for that responsibility. The new leader begins to deal with conflicts, priorities, indicators, crises and complex choices without necessarily having developed the repertoire for it. 

The consequence is usually a leadership captured by urgency. Instead of developing people, it hands out demands. Since it cannot investigate causes, it manages symptoms. And instead of building stability, it responds to whatever comes up. Little by little, its agenda comes to be determined by the heat of operations rather than by a clear management routine. 

The signs of this weakness rarely appear all at once. They emerge in recurring rework, communication failures between shifts, decisions made with incomplete information, variability tolerated as normal, teams that stop suggesting improvements and good professionals who begin looking for opportunities outside the company. Later, these signs accumulate into loss of trust, a deteriorating climate, higher turnover and greater dependence on external hiring. 

At this point, the lack of talent is no longer just a market condition and begins to be reinforced by the organization's own choices. The company complains about the lack of prepared people, but does not always realize that its management model also produces this absence when it does not act to sufficiently develop those already inside. 

From a lean perspective, this picture reveals one of the most serious forms of waste: intellectual waste. The company pays professionals capable of thinking, learning and contributing, but maintains an environment that limits autonomy, initiative and the ability to solve problems. This waste shows up in the silence of teams, in low participation in improvements, in apathy toward recurring issues and in the distance between those who decide and those who actually know the work. 

AI makes this waste even more sensitive. The more data, algorithms and automation enter operations, the more important human judgment becomes, capable of formulating good questions, interpreting information, understanding contexts and learning from results. Without this judgment, technology can increase the speed of response without improving the quality of the decision. 

That is why the way out is not to replace the discussion about management with a discussion about technology, nor to imagine that recruitment alone will solve a shortage that is also organizational. Industry needs to raise the maturity of its human development systems. It has to develop leaders with method, create learning environments within the routine and convert real operational situations into collective knowledge. 

This is where the lean way offers a particularly relevant contribution. In its most mature form, lean is not just a set of tools to improve productivity, flow or efficiency. It is a management architecture that develops people while improving processes. Its value lies in creating routines, standards, conversations, indicators and behaviors that bring leadership closer to reality and make operations a continuous space for learning. 

In this logic, the leader is, above all, someone who teaches. He or she does not merely demand results or assign tasks. The leader observes the work, prepares the team, sustains standards and helps people better understand the challenges they face. This change of role shifts leadership from episodic command to the everyday building of capability. 

In this context, the gemba, for example, is not just the place where work happens. It is a discipline of getting close to reality before making decisions. There, the leader observes, listens, asks questions, tests hypotheses and helps the team develop critical thinking about its own process. Management stops relying only on reports or distant perceptions and starts learning from the real work, in the place where it happens. 

The “skills matrix” fulfills another essential function by making competency gaps visible. With it, the company can plan the development of professionals, reduce promotion decisions based on personal favoritism or urgency and understand where there are risks of excessive dependence on a few specialists. In an environment of accelerated technological change, this visibility is no longer merely useful but becomes decisive, creating room for multiskilling and individualized development. 

“Standardized work” creates the foundations for managerial stability. It defines essential routines so that leaders monitor processes, support teams and take care of people's development. Without these routines, leadership tends to be consumed by “whoever shouts the loudest.” With them, it is in a position to observe better, support better and act before small deviations turn into crises. 

“A3 thinking” contributes by raising the quality of managerial reasoning. It guides leaders to structure problems, examine facts and data, investigate causes, propose countermeasures and learn from the results. In an era marked by information overload and instant answers, this discipline protects the organization from guesswork and from the temptation to confuse speed with good decisions. 

“Daily Management” routines complete this logic by creating a structured cadence of dialogue, prioritization and escalation of problems. When well conducted, DM strengthens the chain of help, organizes the conversation about performance and support, and allows operational, human and decision-making difficulties to be addressed before they accumulate. 

These practices gain strength when they operate together in everyday life. The gemba brings leadership closer to reality. The skills matrix gives visibility to gaps and to the development of teams. Standardized work creates discipline. The A3 improves the quality of thinking. Daily Management sustains conversation, help and learning. Together, they create a system for developing people while the company improves its processes and its performance. 

This change also requires a different way of measuring the quality of management. Productivity, quality, safety and OEE remain fundamental, but they are not enough to reveal the health of the leadership system. The company needs to track prepared successors, the development of critical skills, the average time to train people for new roles, participation in improvements, the quality of mentoring and the maturity of management routines. Without these signals, leadership development remains in the realm of intentions. 

It is also necessary to take care of the governance of promotions. Clear development criteria, transparent development policies and objective meritocracy rules reduce the room for decisions made solely for the convenience of the moment. When employees understand what is expected of them and perceive fairness in the system, they tend to invest more in their own growth and build more consistent bonds with the organization. 

The talent shortage, therefore, also measures the managerial maturity of companies. The lack of qualified professionals is real and should not be minimized. However, the inability to prepare those already inside the organization is a decision, even if it is often made by omission. 

An industry that depends only on hiring ready-made leaders will be increasingly exposed to the fluctuations of the labor market. One that learns to develop leaders creates a competence of its own, harder to copy and sustainable over time. 

This may be one of lean's most timely contributions. It shows that retaining talent is not just about offering positions, salaries or promises of growth. It is about creating an environment in which people learn, contribute, solve problems and realize that their development is directly related to the organization's performance. 

In a context of AI, automation and rapid transformation of competencies, this message becomes even more powerful. Competitive advantage will not come only from better machines, more sophisticated algorithms or more aggressive hiring. It will depend on the ability to create systems in which leaders teach, teams learn and real problems are transformed into organizational knowledge. 

When this happens, the company stops merely reacting to the talent shortage. It begins to build its own capacity to develop people, strengthen teams and sustain results. In practice, it turns human development into a permanent competitive advantage.