A unit director who’s spent eight months unable to find the regulatory profile he needs. A plant manager wrestling with absenteeism that won’t come down. A CEO watching her competitor grow revenue with fewer roles than she has.
And, as usual, they all tell me the same thing: “There’s no talent out there.”
Let me be clear. That’s not it.
You work in a sector that has turned diagnosis into a science. Tests, protocols, biomarkers. You’d never dream of medicating a patient without first understanding what’s going on inside.
And yet, when the company starts to fail, we do exactly the opposite. We medicate the symptom blindly.
People are missing: we hire. They leave: we raise salaries. The new skills aren’t coming through: we set up a training plan. Pills, one after another. Without running a single test on the organisation.
After more than 600 talent searches and almost a hundred organisational transformation projects, I’ll tell you straight: in health-sector companies, the problem is rarely the one it appears to be.
The set of symptoms almost nobody connects
I hear the same symptoms in nearly every company in the sector. And they’re treated separately, as if they were unrelated ailments.
A talent shortage that isn’t about volume, but about hybridisation: it’s not that scientists or engineers are missing.
- What’s missing is people who can move at once between science, data, AI, regulation and the speed of the market. Bridge profiles, who can translate between the lab and the business.
- Hyper-specialised teams where knowledge doesn’t flow: science on one side, the business on the other, and a wall in between.
- The parent company’s strategy that never quite lands in the local reality, with leaders who don’t fully embody the corporate culture.
- Roles nobody knows how to evolve without falling short on capability or sending the wage bill through the roof.
- And, beneath it all, a silent dependence on a handful of key people on whom the client relationship hangs.
Each symptom is treated in isolation. A vacancy here, a retention plan there. But these aren’t separate ailments. They’re the same clinical picture. And it all points to the same place: how the organisation is designed and led.
What really erodes the capacity to deliver the strategy
This week I was at a workshop at IESE, in Barcelona, with some of the most powerful companies in European health. The topic: what skills the industry will need by 2035.
We started out talking about artificial intelligence. We ended up talking about who can adapt and who can’t. About people, about connection, about leadership. We always end up there.
Because the pressure is external and technological, but the bottleneck is internal. AI does force change, yes. But what really holds things back isn’t the technology:
- it’s complex organisations,
- with strict regulation,
- long R&D cycles,
- matrix structures that can’t evolve at the speed the business demands,
- and misjudged assumptions about what their teams can actually take on.
None of that is fixed by a recruitment campaign.
The skills of the future aren’t prescribed. They’re grown.
The sector is brilliant at identifying which skills it will need. It does that diagnosis well. Where it fails is in what comes next: in creating the conditions for those capabilities to awaken inside the organisation, to develop and, above all, to stay.
A skill isn’t a pill you take and that’s that. It only grows in a healthy organism, with the right leadership, clarity and connection. If the organism is sick, it doesn’t matter how many you feed it: they won’t take.
And bringing them in from outside doesn’t solve the root of it either. I know this first-hand, because Grupo Binternational started out almost fifteen years ago moving healthcare professionals around Europe, back when this crisis was already brewing. Importing capabilities relieves things for a while. But real health is built from within.
In the health sector, what we usually call a “skills gap” is really an organisational capability gap: the distance between the skills a company knows it needs and its real ability to generate and retain them in-house. It isn’t a training problem or a hiring problem. It’s a problem of organisational design.
Organisational design in Life Sciences: how we run the diagnosis
Before prescribing anything, we explore the real organisation. Not the one on the org chart. The one that actually beats.
We see the company as a living system, with nine organs to keep healthy and connection with people as its backbone. That’s our methodology: a complete analysis of organisational health, area by area, to find where the source lies and not waste time treating symptoms.
When you sort that out, skills grow. And they stay.
The question I’ll leave you with
Most companies in the sector know which skills they’ll need. Few ask the one that really matters:
Do I have a healthy organisation, capable of generating that talent by itself, again and again?
Because when you say you’re short of people… short of what, exactly? And that thing you’re calling a talent problem — have you diagnosed it? Or have you spent months prescribing without ordering a single test?
The greatest risk in the health sector isn’t running out of the skills of the future. It’s building organisations incapable of generating them.
Why is it so hard to fill roles and retain talent in Life Sciences?
Because the problem is rarely a lack of candidates. In the health sector, turnover, absenteeism and unfilled vacancies are usually symptoms of an organisational design that fails to generate and keep the capabilities the strategy demands. Hiring or training more won’t fix it if the organisation isn’t built for those skills to emerge and stay. The first step isn’t to look outside, but to diagnose within.
Let’s run a test
If you lead a Life Sciences company and you’ve got critical roles unfilled, rotation that won’t stop or absenteeism that’s shot up, I’ll suggest something very much from your own world.
Don’t start with the treatment. Start with the diagnosis.
Drop me a line and we’ll run a first exploration of your organisation together. No strings attached. A conversation to see whether the problem is where you think it is… or where we almost never look.
All the best.
