Demand for lean professionals remains strong, says study

Executive search and recruiting firm The Avery Point Group, Atlanta, has released a study focused on the content from a wide collection of major internet job board postings. The study found ongoing robust demand for continuous improvement skills overall, with Six Sigma talent demand showing further signs of waning relative to lean. This trend has accelerated since the firm’s 2008 study, when lean first eclipsed Six Sigma as the more desired skill set. This is a major shift away from the Six Sigma talent demand dominance found in APG's first 2005 study.

The study found that job postings looking exclusively for Six Sigma skills, with no mention of lean in the job specification, plummeted to only 13%—down from 27% in the firm’s last talent demand study in 2013. Six Sigma became a much weaker requirement within lean job postings as well. In the 2013 study, 43% of the lean jobs posted also sought candidates with a Six Sigma skill set, but that has dropped to 29% today.

The most recent study also found that job postings seeking lean skills only, with no mention of Six Sigma, leapt to 62%, up from 41% in the 2013 study. When comparing the overall demand between desired skill sets, lean skills exceeded Six Sigma by 129%, by far the largest margin ever seen in the firm's 17 years of talent demand studies.

Tim Noble, managing principal and partner of APG, points to several factors that may be driving this waning demand for Six Sigma:

• Companies continue to focus on hiring pure lean skills sets to foster growth of their continuous improvement programs. They are consolidating resources around lean as a hedge against the challenging economic climate, with a practical focus on waste, flow, and flexibility.
• Companies want skilled lean talent to help their lean programs mature and develop. In addition, some companies have underestimated how much time and talent it takes to shift their lean initiatives from a tools-based approach to lean being embedded in the operating culture.
• Many companies continue to focus their continuous improvement efforts on leaning out their operations by first eliminating waste, putting standard work in place, and improving flow/throughput—often later focusing on reducing process variation and leveraging more of a Six Sigma approach.