Nine out of ten vacancies are replacements
ROA research shows that of the more than two million job openings through 2028, about 90 percent will result from replacement demand: people retiring or temporarily leaving the labor market. So this isn’t about growth, but filling gaps.
UWV asked 3.500 employers about the next five years. Nearly four in ten expect employees to leave through retirement, and that outflow will keep labor shortages going for longer. By around 2035, approximately a quarter of the Dutch population is expected to be 65 or older.
Why this hits small businesses harder. In a company with two hundred employees, someone leaving creates a gap in a team. In a company with fourteen employees, it often means an entire role that no one else can take over—including everything that was never written down.
What exactly disappears
Not the manual. There usually isn't one. What disappears is the kind of knowledge that was never documented because no one thought to ask about it:
The way it works now
- The appointment is in one colleague's mailbox
- Data is manually retyped from one system to another
- The person who knows is on vacation
- No one can see afterwards why this decision was made
As it is
- The agreement is stored with the client, findable for everyone
- Once entered, information flows through to the rest
- Work continues, even if someone is absent
- Every decision has a source, an owner, and a date
The figure everyone cites, and why it is shaky
The same figure keeps appearing: employees would lose 1.8 hours per day searching for information, with the image that you hire five people and four show up. That figure comes from a report by the McKinsey Global Institute from 2012. IDC estimates about 2.5 hours per day; Interact says almost a fifth of working time.
Three sources, three figures, all well over ten years old—and not one of them about Dutch SMEs. That’s why we use these figures as illustrations, never as proof. The most recent and best-documented figure comes from Microsoft (Work Trend Index, 2023, more than 31,000 employees in 31 countries): 62 percent of respondents struggle with spending too much time searching.
Two developments on a collision course
Precisely the companies with the greatest knowledge risk — small, little overlap between functions, much in heads — digitalize the slowest. Of the microenterprises, 13.8 percent used AI technology in 2025, compared to 66.2 percent of large enterprises. See the full figures by company size.
Staff turnover is a given. How quickly you document how the work gets done is not.
Measure where you're getting stuck
Eight questions, ten minutes. You see how many hours are leaking and in which places knowledge sits with one person.
Sources: ROA (The labor market by education and occupation through 2028), UWV, CBS, McKinsey Global Institute (2012), Microsoft Work Trend Index (2023). Every figure was checked against the original publication; outdated figures are marked as such.
Read more: AI use in SMEs: the figures and why AI projects fail.