Banks in Europe are facing shortage of talents, with many of them will be facing difficulties to fill up job vacancies for the next 5 years.

The statement was released last week by McKinsey & Co. team in their periodically published McKinsey Quarterly report. It went on to say that between 25% to 40% of the senior executive positions will be left unoccupied within 3 years time.

The most critical areas of shortage are communication/PR management, process optimization, cross-functional project management, push marketing, talent management, customer insight & research and intermediary channels.

They are followed by other less critical fields including network/branch management, applications & development, applications design, network infrastructure, contract management, product management and underwriting.

The situation is made worse after it was reported recently that graduates in the United States and United Kingdom are less keen to consider banking industry following a number of job slashing by major banks, especially Citibank – once the largest bank in the world by market capitalization. Citibank is now replaced by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ICBC.

The situation is in sharp contrast to few years back, where job in financial and banking industry became one of the most sought after due to the handsome salary and compensation it can offer.

Top human resource managers from more than 10 largest banks in Europe found out that their organizations presently do not have adequate people who are qualified enough to undertake key roles and responsibilities, and critical positions were left vacant for long.