Skills mismatch in Operations & Supply Chain Management roles: perceptions from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations database

People skills, competences, attitudes and personality traits constitute the essential factors on which companies lay the foundation for obtaining competitive advantage and superior business performance. Especially in the fields of operations management (OM) and supply chain management (SCM), the quest for the most appropriate hard/soft skills, competences and personal requirements is critical to keep up with the intense competition. For this reason, the efforts towards the description, specification and classification of skills requirements have been intensifying lately among many industries. The most notable example in this context is the “European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations database” (ESCO), the multilingual classification of occupations within the EU labour market, extending far beyond the OM and SCM domains. The ESCO database aims at providing a framework to connect the relevant stakeholders in the job market, and at improving the matching between people and industry occupations. However, even though the importance of skills requirements in these fields is widely recognized, skills mismatch is often present within companies and dramatically hinders the achievement of operational excellence. Hence, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the skills mismatch for some of the most relevant occupations in the OM and SCM fields – namely: supply chain manager, operations manager – considering the ESCO database specifications and industry requirements. Specifically, the methodology of this contribution examines the key activities for the abovementioned occupations and performs a gap analysis for the jobs’ required skills. Our work specifies guidance to improve the ESCO database and to further align it with industry requirements, thus providing useful insights to researchers and practitioners. Furthermore, with this research we establish the foundation for a methodology to assess the skills mismatch (e.g. hard/soft skills, competences, attitudes, personality traits) regarding key jobs’ tasks in OM and SC