Edel Cassar, Head of Department, Scholarships Unit and National Skills Council, Ministry for Education and Employment

The short answer is this: most, if not all, categories are facing shortages. In some areas, the shortage is at seriously high levels.

The quality and the quantity of human resources are, unquestionably, the backbone of the Maltese economy. In Malta, the size of the labour force and the challenges of industry to find the right skills is magnified by its insularity. Undeniably, in time when the economy booms beyond the available human resources, one of the possible short-term solutions would be to attract foreign workers to fill the gaps and maintain the economic momentum. This is happening in various sectors and such supply satisfies the short-term demand of the sector.

The incoming workers are regulated and monitored by Identity Malta and JobsPlus. In an effort to open up the employment market in a strategic manner, the Malta Vacancy Exemption List is based on vacancy trends and repeated requests by employers who do not manage to engage Malta-based employees. These have to explore the possibility of engaging foreign employees and they do.

The demand for jobs is high for two main reasons: the skills gap issue, whereby the always-diminishing number of unemployed, or inactive, individuals do not fit the bill of what is being requested by suppliers. The second reason is that there is a limitation of local supply and high economic growth absorbs whatever is available, with employers having to look elsewhere to fill vacancies.

READ: Malta needs thousands more foreign workers

This high demand for jobs makes it very lucrative for the Maltese labour market. Often, pay increase in sectors with high demand for people, leading to better salaries and packages.

As time goes by, our ability as a country to be nimble and efficient is improving. Educational institutions are continuously building bridges with industry to ensure we narrow the skills gap.

The dynamic nature of the industry requires that the feedback loop of skills needed is more regular. This would allow for the employment market and the education providers to update themselves as often as necessary. More recent sectoral feedback from companies operating in the manufacturing and aviation industry sectors claim that the lack of employees could impact their decision-making process in the long term on whether to expand in certain areas or not.

On a national and multi-sector level, much more information indicating which jobs might need to be filled by incoming workers will be provided through the publication of the report of the Employee Skills Gap Survey carried out jointly by the National Commission for Further and Higher Education, JobsPlus and Malta Enterprise.

Our ability as a country to be nimble and efficient is improving

The main objective of this study was to collect more solid evidence about the number of employees in different sectors of the economy, recent recruitments, which vacancies are hard to fill and the reasons for such situations. It also collected data on employees’ qualifications, knowledge, skills and competences as well as their training needs during employment.

With such information in hand, Malta will be able to assess better the situation and provide more concrete direction to address the skills gaps in particular fields. To this effect, the Ministry of Education and Employment recently appointed a National Skills Council with the aim of reviewing past and present available skills within the labour force and recommend policy changes to minimise the skill gaps in some sectors.

Our country’s ability to be responsive to market needs is very important. We are competing with many other countries to attract investment and we must continue to work hard to make sure we provide the most relevant and suited opportunities for future generations that are based on real needs of industry, while enhancing an educational experience which provides important elements such as values, life skills and the ability to pursue lifelong learning.

Claudio Grech, Nationalist Party spokesman for the Economy

JobsPlus recently indicated it may require as many as 20,000 foreign workers, mainly to plug the gap in the construction labour force that is necessary to take on the large-scale development projects in the pipeline over the next years.

In and of itself, the attraction of foreign resources to complement local peaks in demand may prove to be a useful measure, albeit a temporary one, which is more of an administrative tool than anything else. One could delve into the causal factors of the scarcity of resources in the affected industries and, invariably, the top two would be the crowding-out effect caused by the public sector employment spree and the general stagnation in the real wages earned by these employees who are not sharing in the overall appreciation of the property market.

However, this is not really where visionary politics is concerned. The way we see it is that the spatial limitations we have in our country impose onerous responsibilities on us politicians to determine how this limited space can be utilised sustainably and enjoyed in the common interest. This is why we firmly believe that the attraction of foreign talent should be an integral part of our economic strategy and not merely a short-term, knee-jerk reaction, ironically limitedly resorted to in the further encroachment of the very same space limitations we are facing.

We need to realise that each employee (and, potentially, also his family members) come at a cost to the common good: a financial cost on our national infrastructure (which we pay for through taxes) and a liveability cost created by the increased density compression of the space we work, commute and live in.

The attraction of foreign talent should be an integral part of our economic strategy

There is no two ways about the fact that although we are geographically an island, we are no economic island. Despite the naysayers we faced years ago, the Nationalist Party’s EU mission and digital vision enabled us to ditch cheap-labour industries for high value-added economies, creating innovative industries in the peak of the global financial crises. This is why we now need to attract global (not necessarily limited to the EU) talent but that talent needs to be channelled towards the economic sectors and industries that generate high value added. Those industries that are not environmentally detrimental; those sectors that create well-paid careers and not rat-racing jobs.

Attracting STEM graduates could reap rewards. Photo: Shutterstock

This is why we need to strongly advocate global talent attraction policies for graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) domains to augment our capacity in the high-tech industries and to start taking our first material steps in research and innovation.

If we want to compete for our space in these industries, the point of departure is the degree of our capability to generate and attract this kind of talent or, rather, the best brains in this kind of talent.

It goes without saying that prior to attracting the foreign talent we should relentlessly strive in retaining our best talent and seek to entice back our nationals who made it offshore and harness their potential into local growth. For that to happen, we need to have a liveable country, a fair system and basic governance in which citizens are not shortchanged by their government.

I am a strong believer that this is not a numbers game but one in which the pursuit of our economic growth is consistently shifted to value-added economic activities driven by a vision of a digital nation that puts liveability at the centre of its policymaking.

I see our country as re-inventing itself into a global melting pot of the best talent converging in a destination that values knowledge, innovation, creativity and an ingrained culture of sophistication incessantly squeezing out the scourge of mediocrity and laissez-faire we face day-in, day out.

This is the future we believe in. This is the future we want to transmit to next generations. This is the future we are responsible to deliver.

If you would like to put any questions to the two parties in Parliament send an e-mail marked clearly Question Time to editor@timesofmalta.com.