Director of State Employment Center Zhovtiak: situation on labor market gradually stabilizes, business feels need for workforce
The situation on the labor market has gradually stabilized, businesses feel the need for workforce, Director of the State Employment Center Yulia Zhovtiak has said.
"This is indeed the case, starting from 2023, the situation on the labor market has gradually stabilized and business now feels the need for workforce, which is recorded both by job search sites and by us at the State Employment Service. The number of current vacancies in the Service database daily is almost 50,000, which is almost twice as much as last year," she said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine, answering a question about the increase in the number of vacancies.
According to Zhovtiak, the same trend can be seen on the Unified Job Portal, which combines job offers not only from the Service, but also from such resources as Work.ua, robota.ua, novarobota.ua, PidBir, grc.ua and ua.jooble.org.
"If at the end of last year there were 200,000 job offers, today there are almost 230,000 vacancies," she added.
Zhovtiak said that over the past two years the structure of vacancies has remained almost unchanged. In particular, there are many vacancies for representatives of such professions as seller, driver, accountant, cook, loader, doctor, seamstress, teacher, electrician, preschool teacher, pharmacist, auto mechanic, turner, and psychologist.
"There have always been a lot of these vacancies. There is also a demand for builders, and it will grow. And the question here is that today we do not have the number of men on the register that is needed in the construction industry. That is, now there will be a real shortage of personnel in this area," she said.
As for job seekers who apply for services to the Employment Service, according to Zhovtiak, most of them are former trade workers. In second place are people who worked in public administration, followed by agriculture and the processing industry.
"Until 2022, there was an insufficient number of jobs in the labor market, but today the main problems are the professional and qualification imbalance, the lack of qualified personnel. In terms of regions, the situation is even more threatening. After all, a large number of people have left abroad, many internally displaced citizens, mobilization," stated the head of the service, noting that the most vacancies are in large regions: Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Kyiv.
"The average salary for vacancies on the Unified Portal is UAH 19,000. However, there are offers for seamstresses with a salary of UAH 45,000 or for drivers with UAH 50,000," Zhovtiak said.