A decade ago, trade compliance was a relatively quiet corner of the business: a handful of specialists classifying products, screening customers and keeping the paperwork in order. Today it is one of the tightest talent markets in the entire regulatory field. Companies are competing hard for a small pool of people who understand sanctions and export controls, and many are discovering that the expertise they need simply is not available to hire at the price, - or in the timeframe - they expected.
The gap is real and it is widening: because the causes point directly to how organisations should respond.
Demand has exploded
The obvious driver is geopolitics. Sanctions regimes have expanded at a pace no compliance team could have planned for. The response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine alone produced wave after wave of new measures across the US, EU and UK, often introduced with little notice and layered on top of one another. At the same time, export controls have moved to the centre of great-power competition, with restrictions on semiconductors, advanced computing and other dual-use technologies redrawing the map of what companies can sell, to whom, and where.
The result is that trade compliance is no longer a niche concern for defence contractors and a few global manufacturers. Technology firms, banks, logistics providers, life sciences companies and startups shipping anything with a dual-use dimension have all found themselves needing expertise they never previously employed. Demand has broadened across industries at the same time as it has deepened within them.
Enforcement has sharpened the incentive. Penalties for getting it wrong now run into the hundreds of millions, and personal liability and reputational damage raise the stakes further. When the cost of a mistake is that high, hiring genuine expertise stops being a discretionary spend and becomes a form of insurance.
Supply cannot keep up
Demand alone does not create a skills gap; the problem is that the supply of qualified people is structurally slow to grow.
Trade compliance expertise is not something you can pick up in a short course. It sits at the intersection of law, geopolitics, product knowledge and operational detail. A strong specialist needs to interpret ambiguous and fast-changing regulation, understand how a product actually works well enough to classify it, and translate all of that into decisions the business can act on. That blend takes years to build, and much of it is learned on the job rather than in a classroom.
There is also no clear pipeline. Few people set out to become sanctions or export-control specialists; most arrive sideways, from customs, law, logistics, the military or government agencies. Universities produce very few graduates with directly relevant training, so the profession cannot simply recruit its way out of a shortage the way better-established fields can.
The people who do have deep expertise are concentrated in a relatively small number of large organisations and law firms, and they know their value. They are expensive, they are courted constantly, and they are hard to prise loose. For a mid-sized company trying to build a function from scratch, competing for that talent on salary alone is often a losing game.
What the gap actually looks like
For employers, the shortage shows up in familiar frustrations: roles that stay open for months, offers that get turned down or gazumped, and salaries climbing faster than budgets. Increasingly it shows up as risk: teams stretched too thin to keep pace with regulatory change, or a single senior expert who has become a dangerous point of failure.
For candidates, the picture is the mirror image. Genuine specialists can command strong salaries, negotiate on flexibility and title, and move when they choose. Capable people one step below - those with the aptitude but not yet the full depth - are in a strong position too, if they can demonstrate judgement and a willingness to keep learning.
How to respond
Because the gap is structural, throwing money at it rarely solves things. The organisations that are tackling this in the right way tend to do four things:
1. They hire for judgement and trajectory, not just a checklist of regimes. Someone who can reason through an ambiguous classification and knows when to escalate is more valuable than someone who has simply memorised the current rules — which will change anyway.
2. They build as well as buy. Given how thin the external market is, growing talent internally — bringing in bright people from customs, legal, logistics or operations and developing them — is often faster and more durable than waiting for the perfect external hire. That means investing in training and retention rather than assuming the market will provide.
3. They look beyond the obvious backgrounds. The best trade compliance hires often come from unconventional routes. Widening the search to ex-government, ex-military, customs brokers and adjacent legal specialists opens up a much larger pool than fishing only for people who already carry the exact job title.
4. They partner with a specialist trade compliance recruiter who knows the market intricately and can approach ‘passive talent’ – those who are not actively looking for a new role but could be tempted away by a compelling opportunity.
The bottom line
The trade compliance skills gap is not a temporary blip. It is the product of demand rising sharply and permanently while supply grows slowly and from a small base. The companies that recognise this - and adapt their talent strategy accordingly - will be the ones that build compliance functions able to keep pace with a world that is only getting more complex.
If you are hiring in trade compliance or seeking your next opportunity, please reach out to Jamie Browne for an informal chat.
