Mid-Career Capability in the Chemical Industry

Much of the conversation around skills in the chemical industry understandably focuses on two ends of the workforce.

At one end is attraction: encouraging graduates, apprentices and people from adjacent industries to build careers in chemicals.

At the other is the loss of experienced capability: retirement, succession planning and the transfer of knowledge accumulated over long careers.

Both matter.

But between those two points sits another important part of the workforce: the people who are now expected to step into increasingly specialist, commercial, technical and leadership positions.

The strength of that mid-career population is not determined by recruitment activity today alone.

It reflects the people the industry attracted, developed, retained and exposed to meaningful experience over many years.

Capability Is Built Over Time

Experience in the chemical industry is rarely developed quickly.

Technical knowledge is one part of it, but capability is also built through exposure: to customers, products, applications, regulatory environments, manufacturing processes, commercial decisions and changing market conditions.

For many specialist positions, employers are not simply looking for someone who can perform a function.

They may need someone who understands a particular chemistry or application, has worked with a specific customer base, can operate across technical and commercial environments, or has progressed far enough to lead others while retaining meaningful market knowledge.

That combination takes time to develop.

It is why the availability of experienced talent today is connected to workforce decisions made much earlier.

Pressure Across the Talent Pipeline

Skills pressure within the chemical industry is not a new conversation.

Industry bodies have been examining attraction, skills development, workforce demographics and succession for years.

What is particularly interesting is how some of those earlier concerns connect with the recruitment market visible today.

Work by the Chemical Industries Association and Cogent Skills found employers already reporting difficulty accessing people with the required skills, job-specific knowledge and industry experience. Employers also described increasing difficulty replacing the experience and knowledge lost when older workers retired.

The demographic context was already visible. The proportion of workers aged 50 and above in the sector increased from 33.6% in 2010 to 36.2% in 2020, while employers described the knowledge leaving with retiring employees as difficult to replace and something that could take considerable time to develop internally.

At the same time, routes into and through the industry were under pressure.

Chemical manufacturing apprenticeship starts shown in the report fell from 940 in 2015/16 to 520 in 2020/21, although the later period also coincided with the disruption of the pandemic.

Graduate recruitment alone was not necessarily an immediate answer either. Employers reported mixed experiences of graduate readiness and highlighted the need for closer alignment between industry and education around the capabilities businesses would require.

None of these factors in isolation explains the experienced talent market today.

Together, however, they illustrate something important:

capability pipelines are built over time, and the effects of gaps within them may only become fully visible years later.

What Has Shaped Today’s Mid-Career Workforce?

This provides another way of looking at the experienced talent challenges businesses encounter today.

When a business struggles to recruit someone with a particular combination of technical knowledge, market experience and commercial capability, the immediate conclusion can be that there is a shortage of candidates.

Sometimes there is.

But the more useful question may be:

How many people have actually had the opportunity to develop that combination of experience?

The available population is influenced by much more than how many people entered the industry.

It is shaped by who remained within it, where investment in development took place, whether people were given opportunities to broaden their responsibilities and whether knowledge was successfully transferred as experienced employees progressed or retired.

This is particularly important in specialist chemical markets, where experience is not always interchangeable.

Someone can have significant industry experience and still require time to develop the product, process, application, customer or organisational knowledge required by another business.

The CIA/Cogent work captured this particularly well. One participating employer estimated that even somebody joining with experience could take two, three or four years before being considered fully validated in the role. The report also highlighted the bespoke nature of some chemical businesses, where knowledge cannot simply be bought “off-the-shelf” and must instead be developed internally.

That has important implications for workforce planning.

Waiting until capability leaves before attempting to replace it can mean beginning the development process too late.

The Capability Required Is Changing Too

There is another dimension to the challenge.

The capability businesses require is not standing still.

Digitalisation, sustainability and the transition towards Net Zero are changing technologies, processes and, in some cases, the knowledge required across chemical organisations.

The CIA/Cogent research identified increasing demand for higher-level skills alongside innovation, data analysis, leadership, change management and R&D. It also emphasised the importance of lifelong learning, career development, upskilling and reskilling as existing employees adapt to changing requirements.

This means experience itself is not static.

A strong mid-career workforce is not simply a group of people who have accumulated a certain number of years in the industry.

It is a population that has continued to develop as the industry around it has changed.

That makes internal development particularly important.

People need opportunities not only to deepen specialist knowledge but also to broaden their exposure: moving between technical and commercial environments, taking on greater customer responsibility, participating in strategic projects, leading teams or gaining experience across markets and geographies.

Those experiences can ultimately determine whether somebody is capable of stepping into the roles businesses will need next.

What We See Through Recruitment

From a recruitment perspective, this becomes visible when a brief reaches the market.

A business may need someone with a very particular combination of sector knowledge, customer relationships, technical understanding, commercial capability, leadership experience and geography.

Individually, none of those requirements may be especially unusual.

The difficulty often appears at the intersection between them.

The number of people who genuinely combine all of the required elements can become surprisingly small.

That does not necessarily mean the industry lacks talented people.

It can mean the required capability exists across several different profiles rather than within one immediately identifiable candidate.

It is also why job title alone can be misleading.

Two people carrying the same title may have developed very different levels of responsibility, market exposure, technical depth or commercial experience.

Understanding where capability actually exists therefore requires looking beyond titles and asking what people have genuinely been exposed to, developed and delivered.

Looking at Mid-Career Talent Differently

There is no single solution to a complex workforce challenge.

Attraction remains important. So do apprenticeships, graduate recruitment and bringing transferable capability into the industry.

But organisations may also benefit from looking more closely at the population already progressing through their businesses.

Who could take on broader responsibility with the right development?

Where could technical employees gain greater commercial exposure?

Where could commercial employees deepen their technical understanding?

Which people hold knowledge that needs to be transferred?

Where are succession plans dependent upon somebody who has not yet had the experiences required to make the next step?

And where might a business be defining a future hire so narrowly that potentially transferable capability is being overlooked?

These are development questions as much as recruitment questions.

The Mid-Career Capability Question

The chemical industry cannot change the conditions that shaped the workforce of previous years.

It can influence the capability available in the years ahead.

The people entering the industry now matter enormously, but so do the people already progressing through it.

They are the future technical specialists, commercial leaders, functional heads and executives.

The question is not simply whether enough people are entering the industry.

It is whether enough people are being given the experience, development and opportunity required to become the capability the industry will need next.

Because tomorrow’s experienced talent market is already being built today.

Research and industry context

This Insight combines Laborare Group’s observations from specialist chemical recruitment with wider industry research and workforce analysis, including:

The industry sources provide wider context around workforce demographics, skills development, attraction, succession and future capability. Recruitment-market observations and interpretations within this Insight are Laborare Group’s own.