How have staffing levels in Private Equity changed from 2020 to 2022?

The past 3 years has seen huge levels of economic uncertainty with the COVID pandemic, high inflation and cost of living crisis being a few of the main causes of this. Our 2022 Private Equity report has now been released, so in this article I will be taking a closer look at how staffing levels have changed over this unsteady period.

The graph below shows the staffing level changes across all firms in our past 3 years of surveys. As we can see, a higher percentage of firms chose to increase their number of Investment Professionals, compared to the increases of Admin professionals over the 3 years. This could be down to the nature of the roles. Investment Professionals have a direct impact on performance through investment research, analysis and negotiation. Particularly in times of uncertainty, investment performance plays a major part in the survival of these companies so this could be the main reason that the focus has shifted towards increasing the number of investment-related roles.

In 2020 only 45% of firms chose to increase their number of Admin Professionals, with another 45% keeping their levels the same. These lower rates of hiring compared to the 60% t increase in the number of Investment Professionals, could also have been affected by the difference in experience required for the two role groups.

After 2020, the number of firms increasing both Investment and Admin Professionals rose. 95% of firms increased the size of their investment teams in 2021, possibly because in the previous year there was no change in over 30% of companies. In 2022, however, whilst no firms chose to reduce the number of their Investment Professionals, 30% reduced their Admin numbers, 3x the levels of decrease seen in previous years. This could be down to a number of reasons, including high inflation resulting in higher staffing costs and uncertainty surrounding Brexit.

MM&K has recently released the 2022 version of our Private Equity and Venture Capital Report, detailing all remuneration elements and trends throughout the year. For more information, contact Margarita Skripina.

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