Employment action plan to be ready by June

Education Minister Louis Galea said the government was working on a national action plan on employment that was expected to be completed by June this year.

A national process of dialogue within the framework of the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development was being set in motion for the coming weeks and months.

"The national action plan will address various issues concerning employment and will be implementing programmes to achieve targets within established timeframes," he said yesterday at a General Workers' Union conference on Lifelong Learning at the Jerma Palace Hotel, in Marsascala.

He said an integral part of the action plan was going to be education and particularly lifelong education and learning.

Dr Galea referred to a Joint Assessment Paper of the Employment Policy Priorities of Malta which noted the low skill levels of the Maltese workforce and the need to raise these with the involvement of the social partners.

A communication from the European Commission to the Council on acceding countries' progress on implementing JAP priorities had noted that acceding countries all had evidence of skill shortages and mismatches. Unless they upgraded their skills they would lack the capacity for the adaptation required in a rapidly changing environment.

The communication noted that an average of six per cent of adults (aged 25 - 64) in acceding countries were in lifelong learning, that is, they had had some form of education or training in the preceding four weeks.

This did not compare favourably to either the EU average of 8.5 per cent or the EU target of 12.5 by 2010.

Malta's rate of lifelong learning was currently 4.4 per cent, on a par with Poland and marginally higher than Cyprus, Hungary and Lithuania.

The Commission noted that the low levels of education among the Maltese workforce remained a matter of concern.

"Trade unions today also need to change. This means that they should be studying strategies of lifelong learning and human resource development with the other social partners.

"It also means that they should redeploy a large part of their resources towards educational and training provision for their members, especially those threatened with job loss, and that training and lifelong learning opportunities should feature strongly in their collective bargaining with employers on their members' behalf," Dr Galea said.