The figure
Projections by France Stratégie and Dares, the French labour ministry's statistics office, put hiring needs at 760,000 jobs a year between 2019 and 2030. The total adds up two things: net job creation and end-of-career departures. The departures account for 90% of it.
The figure gets little airtime, probably because it is less striking than a labour shortage rate. Yet it is the more fundamental of the two. A shortage rate describes a market at one moment. This one describes a mechanism whose timetable is already known.
What sets this figure apart
Net job creation depends on the economy, on order books, on investment decisions. It gets debated, revised, postponed.
End-of-career departures do not. Over the same period they amount to 28% of 2019 employment. More than a quarter of the people in work six years ago will have left by 2030. No workload plan will change that.
In other words: you have your site's age pyramid, so you already have the list. You know who will leave, roughly when, and from which job. It is one of the few pieces of HR information that needs neither a study nor a consultant.
Replacing is not creating
A new job is something you build. You write the job description, define the scope, and accept that the first year is for running it in.
A replaced job is something you take over. And that is a different demand. The replacement inherits something that already exists, which they have to rediscover, not invent: a way of setting a machine, an order of operations that avoids a known defect, a list of customers and their habits, a knack for a tricky part.
If that existing knowledge is documented, the arrival is a handover. If it lives only in the head of the person leaving, the arrival is a rebuild. And a rebuild costs months, scrap, downtime, sometimes a customer.
What cannot be replaced
Hiring always gets sorted in the end. You widen the pool, raise pay, train in-house, bring in a temp while you search. It is slow and expensive, but it gets sorted.
Undocumented know-how does not. On the day of the leaving drinks, there is no plan B. And it is rarely the official procedure that is missing: it often exists, filed on a server, up to date with the latest version of the quality system. What is missing is everything it leaves out. The sound that signals a drift. The setting you correct by a quarter turn without thinking. The reason you do things in this order and not the other.
That kind of knowledge is hard to write down, for a simple reason: the person who holds it no longer remembers holding it. Ask an expert with thirty years in the trade to write up their procedure and you will get two pages. Film them doing it and they will show you twenty.
What you can do before they leave
Four steps, in this order, and no special tool needed to start.
- List the tasks only one person knows how to do. Not the jobs, the tasks. If that person is away for three weeks, what stops or deteriorates?
- Cross-check against departures expected within 24 months. Where the two lists overlap is your queue. It is almost always shorter than you fear, and more urgent than you think.
- Record on the job, not in a classroom. A task is shown where it is done: at the workstation, on the machine, on site. The expert talks through what they are doing while they do it.
- Test it on a newcomer. The only test that matters: can someone who has never seen this job hold it down with what you have produced?
Where ClipHow comes in
ClipHow starts from that recording. An expert films the task with whatever is to hand — smartphone, tablet, PC, webcam, GoPro or smart glasses — and the platform turns it into two deliverables: an e-learning course your teams follow, and a documented work procedure that joins your knowledge base. All on a 100% European technical stack, which matters when the footage is production data.
Our customers work in manufacturing, logistics and transport, digital, healthcare and laboratories, construction, and trades built on critical know-how. What they share is not a sector but the same sentence, heard everywhere: “when he leaves, we don't know how we'll manage.”
The departures, for their part, are already on the calendar.
Source : France Stratégie and Dares, Les Métiers en 2030 (Jobs in 2030), report of the Prospective des métiers et qualifications group
