June 23, 2026 by Fiona Moir

The manufacturing workforce is changing. An ageing workforce, retirements, and shifting career patterns are reshaping who holds critical knowledge. And for businesses operating in regulated chemical markets, the consequences extend well beyond headcount.

It has been visible for years. Most manufacturers have not acted on it.

The people most likely to move on over the coming years are not generalists. They are the regulatory affairs leads, product stewardship specialists, and scientific experts who carry the compliance history of your portfolio. They know which substances were notified under which jurisdictions, which dossiers are due for renewal, which SDS versions remain in circulation across your customer base, and how earlier classification decisions were reached. When they move on, the knowledge most easily lost is not in your files. It is the judgment behind those decisions, and the context that shaped them.

The scale of the shift is now well documented. In 2021, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute projected that the US manufacturing skills gap could leave 2.1 million jobs unfilled by 2030, at a potential cost to the economy of $1 trillion in that year alone. The same study identified the retirement of baby boomers as one of the three primary drivers of unfilled positions, alongside changing workforce expectations and a persistent lack of attraction to the sector.

In the UK, the Chemical Industries Association reports that vacancies in the chemical sector are running 10% above pre-pandemic levels, driven in significant part by early retirement.

The Cefic United Kingdom profile points to a combination of an ageing workforce, Brexit, and constrained immigration, with the rise in economically inactive workers concentrated among those aged 50 to 64, many of whom carry critical skills from within the chemical sector.

Across Europe, Cefic reports that the chemical sector employs 1.2 million people directly, and that around 97% of its approximately 31,000 companies are SMEs. These organisations carry the highest concentration of individual knowledge-holders and, typically, the least capacity to absorb their loss.

The OECD frames this as a structural megatrend, not a temporary cycle. Its Employment Outlook 2025 warns that without swift changes in policy and behaviour, GDP per capita growth will slow significantly in most member countries as the old-age dependency ratio reaches unprecedented levels over the next 35 years. The same report notes that only 37% of older workers aged 55 to 74 change employer or employment status from one year to the next, compared with 54% for workers aged 15 to 54. Experienced specialists tend to stay put until they leave entirely. When they go, the knowledge goes with them.

Where regulatory expertise sits in this picture

The pipeline that was meant to replace retiring expertise is not keeping pace. IChemE's 2025 Employment Survey, drawing on 2,503 members and 875 employers across 114 countries, found that 45% of respondents identified technical skills shortages specific to their sector, and 40% of employers cited a lack of mid-career candidates as a barrier to recruitment.

This is the gap that matters most for compliance. When a regulatory specialist moves on, some of what they held can be recovered. Dossiers, notification records, and SDS archives sit in your systems. What is harder to capture is the reasoning: why a particular classification was taken, how competing jurisdictional obligations were balanced, and which areas were being kept under close review. In a regulatory environment that has grown steadily more demanding across EU REACH and its successors, the EPA's TSCA programme, and tightening UK obligations post-Brexit, that loss of context can carry real consequences for market access, reputation, and in some cases legal standing.

The case for partnership as a resilience strategy

The instinct when a capability gap emerges is to recruit. That response is understandable but increasingly difficult to execute. The talent pool is contracting, specialist regulatory professionals with multi-jurisdictional experience are not widely available, and onboarding timelines for roles that carry genuine institutional knowledge are long. A single new hire also rebuilds the same dependency you have just lost: one person holding the knowledge.

There is a different model, and one a growing number of manufacturers across the EU, UK, and North America are adopting. A specialist partner does not attempt to reconstruct one individual's memory from files alone. It removes the single point of failure entirely. Standing multi-jurisdictional coverage, held across a team rather than in one person's head, means the capability stays in place through whatever changes your own workforce goes through.

The Yordas approach is built on a clear principle. We work alongside your existing teams, not across them. Where you have strength, we do not duplicate it. Where you have exposure, we cover it. The result is a right-sized arrangement that scales with your actual need, fitting your cash-flow model today rather than requiring you to build a permanent cost base around a risk that may not yet have fully surfaced.

This matters because standing still carries its own cost. Areas that were comfortably handled by an experienced internal expert can become harder to maintain once that person has moved on. REACH obligations, TSCA reporting, CLP classification, SDS accuracy, and substance restriction monitoring each rely on continuity of expertise, and a planned approach to that continuity is far easier than recovering ground after the knowledge has gone.

What resilience looks like in practice

Regulatory resilience is not a single project. It is an operating posture. It means having the right expertise available at the right time, irrespective of what is happening to your internal headcount. It means your compliance programme carries on through a departure, a restructure, or a period of higher turnover without your regulatory standing being put at risk.

Yordas brings scientific depth, multi-jurisdictional regulatory intelligence, and managed compliance capability across EU, UK, and North American markets. Our people and platforms work as an extension of your team, helping to protect the knowledge base your business depends on so that what your specialists know stays available to you as your team evolves.

Workforce change is not only a future consideration. For many manufacturers, it is already beginning to shape the regulatory knowledge base their compliance programmes rely on, which makes it a good moment to plan.

Where to start

A good place to begin is understanding where your own continuity sits, which parts of your compliance programme rest heavily on particular individuals, which obligations would be hardest to cover if those people moved on, and where continuity can be secured ahead of time.

Yordas are available to discuss how to mitigate this risk cost-effectively, and to talk through where your business stands. Contact the team today.

FAQs

Regulatory expertise is built over years of direct experience with specific substances, jurisdictions, and compliance histories, and it is rarely fully documented. When a specialist leaves, they take with them an understanding of your portfolio that cannot be reconstructed quickly from files alone. The risk is not just losing a resource. It is losing the institutional memory your compliance programme has been silently depending on.
Yes, and in most cases it works best that way. The Yordas model is designed to complement internal capability, not replace it. We cover the areas where your team has gaps, capacity constraints, or multi-jurisdictional needs that fall outside their day-to-day scope. Your internal team retains ownership. We provide the depth and continuity behind it.
Yordas operates across EU REACH and its successor obligations, UK REACH post-Brexit, US EPA TSCA, CLP classification, SDS authoring and management, global chemical notifications, and regulatory intelligence across more than 100 jurisdictions. Our coverage spans the EU, UK, and North America, alongside key markets including Japan, Brazil, Canada, Türkiye, and Ukraine.

References

1. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute (2021), Creating Pathways for Tomorrow's Workforce Today: Beyond Reskilling in Manufacturing. themanufacturinginstitute.org

2. OECD (2025), OECD Employment Outlook 2025: Can We Get Through the Demographic Crunch? oecd.org

3. Cefic, Facts and Figures of the European Chemical Industry. cefic.org

4. Cefic, Landscape of the Industry: United Kingdom. cefic.org

5. Chemical Industries Association, People and Skills. cia.org.uk

6. IChemE (2026), Employment Survey 2025 results. icheme.org

The Compliance Risk Hiding in Plain Sight

Where regulatory expertise sits in this picture