Maltese people under 30 and small businesses interested in employing them can start benefiting from a new EU-wide job placement scheme introduced as a pilot project by the European Commission.

Through the scheme, called Your First Eures job, Maltese young people looking for a work placement in any other member state can get a grant of up to €900 to help them travel for interviews and eventually relocate to their new workplace.

Small companies employing fewer than 250 employees – as is the case with the vast majority of Maltese firms – will be able to obtain financial compensation per youth employed to set up initial training programmes.

The project, which initially aims at sending about 5,000 youths to workplaces across the EU, will at first be administered by the employment agencies of Germany, Spain, Denmark and Italy. If it proves to be a success, the Commission intends to introduce the scheme permanently in all 27 member states.

The European Commission said the objective was to provide young people with more job opportunities and to address imbalances and mismatches in EU labour markets.

Employment services running the scheme will post information on job openings on their websites, as well as jobseekers’ registration, information and contact details for interested employers.

The pilot project will be open to people with all types of qualifications and work experience as well as to all types of jobs.

Traineeships and apprenticeships are excluded because other EU and national programmes cover such activities.

Politically, the scheme will address the record unemployment levels reached recently in the EU, particularly among youths, which hit 22.6 per cent, according to Eurostat’s most recent data.

At 13.6 per cent, Malta still has one of the lowest youth unemployment levels in the EU.

For details, see http://ec.europa.eu/social/yourfirsteuresjob.

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