On the one hand, we are facing a situation where unemployment is claimed to have reached a high level, even though year on year we are noting a downward trend in unemployment; on the other, we are facing a situation where employers claim they are not finding persons with the skills they require for the jobs they are offering.
It is a frustrating situation for employers, who find that the lack of skills availability may be hampering their growth; it is a frustrating situation for young persons who are looking for a job having just finished their studies, thereby finding themselves unable to start off their working career; it is a frustrating situation for those unemployed persons who are really looking for a job and cannot get themselves employed and job seekers who are seeking to change their job.
To understand just how frustrating the situation is, one simply needs to take a cursory look at the last issue of The Sunday Times. There were something like 110 job vacancies on offer, across a whole spectrum of occupations ranging from salespersons, to technicians, to engineers, to clerks, to accountants, to jobs in the catering sector, to unskilled jobs like delivery men. There were even a number of jobs overseas that were advertised.
What will make it even more frustrating is the fact that several employers will either find that they get very few applicants for the posts they advertised or will get applicants that have a skills profile that does not match their requirements.
Why this happens is a question that continues to baffle several, be they persons that work in the educational sector and persons whose work is related to the provision of skills, be they persons that formulate economic policy, job seekers, employers or social partners.
It is indeed a paradox that we have a number of Maltese persons who have found a job abroad with a certain amount of ease. In fact, we are exporting skills while there are a number of other persons who just cannot find a job anywhere.
We are constrained in certain situations to offer jobs to non-Maltese persons because we cannot find Maltese persons who are willing to do the work; and some employers have had to leave posts vacant because they cannot find persons with the appropriate skills. So we have a situation where persons are chasing a few jobs, while at the same time we also have a situation where jobs are chasing a few persons. Thus it is not as if the economy is incapable of producing jobs; it is rather producing jobs that are finding few takers for what could be a multitude of reasons.
These reasons could be issues related to attitudes, knowledge, experience, personal attributes, employers' expectations and job seekers' expectations. It may also be an issue that employers are expecting either to find staff that are already trained or some form of financial support for having to train new employees.
However, we cannot escape the fact that such a situation is creating bottlenecks in the labour market and this will eventually lead to wage inflation; thereby forcing employers to lose some of their competitive advantage. This is not to mention the wastage of resources that unemployment brings and the social problems that it creates on an individual basis.
From an economic viewpoint one may also argue whether the current unemployment rate of 5.6 per cent is fast becoming the floor for our economy and as such it will become very difficult to reduce it further. This argument would be a very academic one when one considers that our participation rate in the labour market is still very low and way below the average of the European Union; mainly because of a very low participation rate among females. If we manage to push this up, then even our economic growth rate would increase.
One of the elements that is hindering our economic growth is not so much the unemployment rate but rather the participation rate in the labour market. The worry is that there seem to be the opportunities for the participation rate to increase through the significant number of job vacancies on offer, but this is happening too slowly or not happening at all.
For years we have been talking about the point that the job for life is a thing of the past. Economic, social and technological factors, together with everyone's expectation to move forward in life, has led to the fact that nowadays no one starts his or her working life in a job and ends it in the same job. This has led to the claim that we should be focusing more on the employability of our workforce; meaning the ability of the workforce to move into the jobs that are being created while old ones are lost. There appears to be a challenge that we have not yet overcome in this regard.