SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, December 28. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Hospitality, construction, or industrial maintenance are some of the sectors in which it is most difficult to find qualified workers in the Canary Islands. This is revealed by the first Labor Prospecting report of the Canary Islands Employment Service (SCE), which includes the real needs of companies in terms of Human Resources, to reduce the gap that exists between the number of unemployed people and the vacancies that are available. they remain uncovered.
The study, presented this Thursday by the Minister of Tourism and Employment, Jéssica de León, and the director of the SCE, Dunnia Rodríguez, analyzes the data collected in 625 Canarian companies, from September 2022 to the same month of 2023. It addresses, among other aspects, the professional profiles most requested by employers, the vacancies that are most difficult to fill, or the causes that lead to rejecting job offers.
“Every year numerous jobs are left unfilled on the islands, despite the fact that there are more than 700,000 unemployed people,” explained De León, who highlighted that “the data in this report allows us to draw different x-rays to know in what profiles we must train workers and define new strategies for 2024 and the coming years”.
“In short, they will help us adapt the training catalog to the real needs of the labor market, to interconnect the demand and supply of work,” added the counselor. And in these actions, she clarified, collaboration with the private sector and other areas of Government is essential.
The director of the SCE, Dunnia Rodríguez, agreed on this point, insisting that “public-private collaboration must be the common thread to establish the path of active employment policies that adapt to the needs of the market, reinforcing, at the same time time, the role of the SCE as a company placement agency”.
PROSPECTING RESULTS
During the first year of the study, the 625 prospective companies offered a total of 2,438 jobs, of which the SCE managed to directly cover 751, 31%.
The most difficult profiles to find were those linked to the world of hospitality, including waiter, cook, waiter, gardener or lifeguard; followed by construction, mainly electricians, bricklayers, welders, plumbers or locksmiths. There is also a lack of professionals in the industrial maintenance sector, truck and bus drivers, as well as butchers, fishmongers or delicatessens.
According to the study, the main reason is the lack of qualified professionals, since the Canary Islands do not have an adequate training offer, a situation that is worse in the non-capital islands. Also pointed out are the lack of vocation, the low level of English or German, or the lack of the necessary certificate to carry out the activity. In addition, problems with work-life balance, mobility or the lack of rental housing in some municipalities also cause some vacancies to remain uncovered.
In this sense, De León announced that the SCE has already begun to use this data to design new employment programs, and will launch in the coming days a new subsidy to train unemployed people as drivers of goods transport and passengers, with the objective of alleviating the lack of drivers detected on the islands.
Regarding the ways chosen by companies to recruit workers, contact networks (81%), resumes delivered in person (63%) and publications on job portals (60%) stand out. In 40% of cases, they also do so through the SCE, a percentage that must continue to increase to enhance the role of this autonomous body as a placement agency for companies.
