In last week’s contribution, I questioned whose responsibility it is that our country is facing a shortage of skills, in both quantitative terms and in qualitative terms. I pose this question because we have been playing for far too long a blaming game. It is always someone else’s fault but never ours.
I made reference to the event of the Malta Employers’ Association and to the statement by Joseph Farrugia, its director general: “We need to strengthen our capital investment so that new economic activity does not necessarily require more resources but perhaps different and adapted skills.”
To put it succinctly, we need to move up the value chain, a point which institutions such as Malta Enterprise have been rightly making.
This is why I now put the question as to whether we are geared up to what is happening out there. Let us for a moment ignore the details of specific skills or specific subject areas and focus on the broader picture.
I mention Malta Enterprise because this organisation’s role is to promote Malta as an investment location and so feels the pulse of the investors.
It knows that businesses operating in Malta can be competitive only if a set of parameters are met because we do not have a large internal market and we are not a low-cost location. Our size makes it attractive for niche markets, more than anything else.
We need a future workforce that is capable of embracing these changes
What we need to analyse from a macro point of view is how changes in society are impacting work and whether we are geared up for these changes. There is no doubt that in Malta and in other countries, society has gone through significant changes, and this has had an impact on the world of work. These changes have had an impact on employees and their work values.
The first change is in the nature of work. Increasingly, routine-based jobs are dying slowly as automation and artificial intelligence take their place.
We saw this in clerical level administrative jobs or operator-level manufacturing jobs. It will continue relentlessly in the future. Do we appreciate that jobs we have today will become redundant in 10 years’ time?
Most of the jobs that have been created have been categorised as knowledge-based work. Are we gearing ourselves sufficiently to be able to transition to a knowledge economy, a concept first described by Peter Drucker? If we want to move up the value chain, we need to develop systems that build us specialised skills and expertise. This does not necessarily mean persons with more degrees, as some of the newer jobs in Malta have shown.
Secondly, the structure of the workforce has changed. The growth in the Maltese labour force (that is excluding expatriates) has been due to a significant increase in the participation rate of females. We also have a multi-ethnic workforce with 25 per cent and 33 per cent of the workforce being foreign. This forces business leaders to be culturally intelligent, that is able to manage people coming from diverse backgrounds.
In addition, a multi-ethnic workforce means that one cannot adopt one-size-fits-all policies. Motivation and engagement do not work in the same way on everyone. To what extent are we preparing ourselves to work in a more diverse environment and to accept that the typical stereotype worker no longer exists?
As such, we need a future workforce that is capable of embracing these changes because it is not enough for employers to embrace them. As the president of the Malta Employers’ Association stated at the event which I referred to above, gearing ourselves to what is happening out there requires an objective debate among the various social partners with the objective of agreeing on actions to be taken.
The common good needs to prevail as this is a journey we all have to make together.