Labour Market Balance Tool
Do we really have a skills gap?
First published on LinkedIn
I just found the most interesting tool: Arbejdsmarkedsbalancen.
In it, you can search to see if a particular profession has good job opportunities or a recruitment problem etc. I read in The Copenhagen Post about the effects of loosening immigration rules to address a projected workforce shortage in health care. Looking at the Labour Market Balance tool, the demand for (SOSU), health care assistants and helpers is highly location specific and fluctuates for the most part between workforce shortage and good job opportunities (as in, there are plenty of job seekers to fill plenty of open positions). Will these newly attracted skilled internationals be able to just walk into a job or are they going to find it hard to get employed?
The government is pulling on levers such as making family reunification easier, and taking a look at catch 22 rules like needing an address to get a bank account etc. Good stuff, I approve. There is also a scheme that has existed since 2020 called the Positive List for Skilled Workers, and did you know a grand total of 12 people are employed in health&education on that type of permit? (It is not clear how many in education and how many in health)
But that makes sense to me that the scheme is not being used so widely, since there just isn't a huge shortage of health care workers according to the Arbejdsmarkedsbalancen tool. In some regions, briefly, but not consistently.
The coming recruitment crisis is about pay and conditions but instead of addressing the root cause, the answer is to recruit more people than necessary so that pay and conditions do not have to change. A similar pattern is happening in IT: people are asking for a lot of money, so for growth Denmark needs more people to come from abroad to keep salaries affordable for companies.
The upshot is that attracting new people is creating higher levels of unemployment (and under-employment when the workers end up having to do anything to be able to stay).
I feel like if Denmark is asking people to come here to work, there should be enough jobs for them when they get here.