Businesses are getting increasingly worried by a shortage of local skilled workers and tougher competition for foreign workers, the president of the Malta Chamber of Commerce said on Tuesday.
Marisa Xuereb told an EY Malta conference that investors are finding it hard to find local skilled talent to fill their vacancies as job creation outstrips supply.
Guaranteeing a stable, capable workforce for the near future had therefore become one of the biggest challenges that businesses faced, she told the Malta Future Realised conference.
Declining birth rate, young local talent going abroad
The skilled worker shortage had been a growing concern for several years, she said.
“The gains made through a steady increase in female participation in the last decade have plateaued, and the declining birth rate coupled with the eagerness of young graduates to seek greener pastures overseas is making it very difficult for businesses to recruit locally.”
The conference discussion revolved around the results of the 18th annual EY Malta Attractiveness Index, conducted among 120 foreign investors and companies in Malta and published on Tuesday.
It found that the second biggest risk to attractiveness identified by investors was a skills shortage.
Pressures on the infrastructure and the quality of life
EY Malta Country Managing Partner Ronald Attard said that while this may be tempting employers to bring more foreigners to the country, the practice might cram more people into an island that is already very small and limited, causing the quality of life to continue to decrease.
Xuereb said it was also becoming increasingly hard to retain third-country nationals.
“International competition for third-country national workers is making it harder to recruit and retain capable foreign workers as well,” she said.
“There is also a realisation that our infrastructure cannot cope with an ever-increasing population and the pressures of this are seriously compromising our quality of life.”
She said it was becoming increasingly evident that to maintain growth, businesses need to produce more with fewer workers, and output must have a higher value.
Raising salaries not enough to retain employees
Furthermore, it appeared that the problem was getting worse as the country was slowly being drained of young talent that was increasingly expressing interest to leave.
In a discussion that followed, several employers and academics voiced their concerns over how difficult it had become to retain highly skilled employees.
They confessed to finding it hard to retain employees, even by raising salaries.
It was therefore crucial to invest in constant training for employees and to create a flexible, family-like work environment.
They also expressed concerns that automation and artificial intelligence would soon change employment drastically and new workers would have to be equipped with a very specialised and specific set of skills if they wanted to venture out into tomorrow's careers.