The job vacancies that Spain constantly struggles to fill

Europe/Spain/12/02/2020/Author(a):Carmen Sánchez Silva/Source: english.elpais.com

By: Carmen Sánchez Silva.

“We need specialists in artificial intelligence, application developers, customer management experts, and people who have gone through vocational training, who are currently as hard to come by as technological staff,” says Javier Blasco, director of the Adecco Group Institute, which is part of the human resources and temporary staffing firm Adecco Group. “It happens with warehouse workers, forklift operators and ham carvers. There are a lot of jobs with a high demand but very low supply.“

The construction sector is short on specialists in wall masonry and ironworks, as well as crane and other machine operators, according to Blasco. And in the industrial sector there is demand for forklift drivers, welders, milling machine operators and specialists in electromechanics. The same applies in the food sector, with skilled workers needed in food handling, carving and to perform various slaughterhouse duties. “These are well-paid workers because their position requires great physical effort and subjects them to thermal stress,” explains Blasco.

According to the experts, anyone specializing in these fields will have no trouble finding employment. In general, workers emerging from vocational training can expect an annual gross salary of between €25,000 and €35,000, although those with the most sought-after skills will be on €40,000.

The sources consulted for this story all agree that in 2019, for the first time, there was more demand for professionals who have undergone vocational training than for university graduates. “They have better employment prospects and even better pay, given that many university students do not work in jobs related to their degree,” says Andreu Cruañas, president of the temporary staffing company Asempleo.

At Adecco, 42% of job offers required vocational training compared to 38.5% requiring a university degree. At the employment website Infojobs, which processes three million job offers annually, a quarter of its vacancies require vocational training while only 14% require a university degree. According to Neus Margalló, a data and research analyst at Infojobs, more than 40% of the ads are aimed at unskilled workers or those with no more than basic qualifications.

Although the future lies in digital technology, Spanish companies are still not hiring many experts in that field. Of the 22.5 million contracts signed in 2019, computer technicians and programmers did not account for even 1%, nor do they figure among the fastest-growing hirings.

Experts note there is little correlation between the education system and the demands of the labor market

The contracts showing the greatest growth rate are actors (28%), technicians in workplace hazard prevention (27%), waste sorters (23%), journalists (19.6%), crane and machinery operators (19.4%), emergency health workers (18.9%), slaughterhouse staff (18.5%) and delivery workers or messengers (15.9%). The demand for computer scientists rose last year by 6% from 2018, according to data from Spain’s State Public Employment Service (SEPE).

A complaint voiced repeatedly by both entrepreneurs and human resources professionals in recent years is the lack of digital expertise. All sectors are crying out for it, it is not confined to technology firms alone. According to Infojobs, vacancies in general attract an average of 38 applicants each while vacancies in the realm of computer science struggle to attract 10.

The vacancies that are hardest to fill and have no unemployment rate include engineers, cyber-security experts, network administrators, programmers in the Python language and big data, and experts in robotics, artificial intelligence, 5G wireless technology and augmented reality. These workers are on high salaries, according to Blasco, earning between €50,000 and €60,000 per year. There is also high demand for social media programmers, digital analysts and customer experience specialists.

“You can’t find people with these skills – there are very few of them around as there are no degrees for these specialties,” Blasco says. “Nobody studies blockchain or digital marketing. They either do a master’s degree or take a six-month boot camp course.”

Blasco says that it typically takes the government two years to react to an extreme lack of candidates by proposing training courses, but that by the time these are up and running, demand has often tailed off. According to Cruañas, there is little correlation between the education system and the demands of the labor market, a problem that can be seen in the field of big data analysis.

The start-up response

That is why start-ups such as Jobbatical – a company that headhunts technology experts all over the world – have taken off in Spain. According to the firm’s founder, Karoli Hindriks, Spain and Germany have the highest technological growth rates in Europe. Jobbatical deals mainly with software engineers, devOps engineers, UX / UI designers and data scientists, experts whose salaries range between €35,000 and €65,000 a year, depending on experience.

Another start-up, Valencia-based Jeff, offers in-house laundry and hairdressing services, and has set itself a target of hiring 500 employees in 2020, doubling its workforce to accommodate its expansion. It needs frontend and backend developers, product designers and data scientist developers as well as 150 consultants for its sales team – because specialized sales people are also hard to find, according to Margalló.

English version by Heather Galloway.

Source: https://english.elpais.com/economy_and_business/2020-02-06/the-job-vacancies-that-spain-struggles-to-fill.html

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Is Online Education a Jobs Engine?

By Joshua Kim

I like nothing better than getting things wrong. When we are wrong, we learn something.

So I interested to read a NYTimes piece on 7/10/17 on e-commerce, the tech sector, and job creation.

For a while now I’ve thought that the growth of online shopping is killing retail jobs, and that this trend would inevitably result in overall job losses as less the role of sales people and cashiers is eliminated.

But maybe I’ve been wrong.

And if online shopping is really a jobs engine, couldn’t online learning also be a job creator for educators?

The Times article summarizes research from Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, that makes the case that online shopping has created more jobs than it has displaced in bricks-and-mortar retail stores.

According to Mandel, in the decade between 2007 to 2017 the e-commerce industry created 397,000 jobs in the United States. This compares to loss of 76,000 jobs in the traditional retail industry. Even better, the jobs created in e-commerce fulfillment – such as warehouse jobs – pay on average 30 percent more than retail positions.

The article is quick to point out that Mandel’s findings are controversial. It is difficult to assign job creation directly to the growth of e-commerce, as it is not always clear what tasks employees of Amazon or Google or other tech companies are assigned. Nor is it certain that warehouse job creation will not plateau, as productivity around online shipping grows as the sector grows, and as warehouses themselves become more automated.

Might online education be operating in some similar ways as online shopping?

How many good jobs in education have been created by the growth in online learning?

From 2002 to 2014 the number of students who took at least one online course rose from 1.6 million to 5.8 million. The bulk of all online learning programs are concentrated in non-profit institutions, accounting for over 2 million of the total 2.8 million enrolled in online only programs. From 2012 to 2014 the percentage of 4-year schools offering online degree programs rose from 46 percent to 59 percent.

Has anyone counted the number of jobs, and what types of jobs, that the growth in online education has created?

Conventional wisdom would hold that online learning has the potential to displace full-time residential faculty with contingent online instructors. But is this really true?

Many schools that I know of draw their online faculty from the same pool of full-time and tenure-track/tenured faculty as their residential programs – as well as from the same pool of part-time and adjunct faculty teaching in-person.  If anything, I’ve seen online learning offer more opportunities for teaching gigs for all higher ed teachers.

Has anyone been able to count the number of instructional design and other non-faculty educator jobs that have been created by the growth of online education?  Quality online programs require a team approach to course development.  Faculty (subject matter experts) are paired with experts in learning design and technology.

The indirect impact of online learning on higher education employment may also be under-appreciated.  I’d like to see some national level data on the revenue impact of online programs on the budgets of non-profit institutions.  How much cross-subsidization of residential programs is occurring from online units?  How many higher ed jobs have been saved or created by profitable online units?

Where would one start in unpacking the higher education employment impact of online education?

Can we interest Michael Mandel and the Progressive Policy Institute in taking up this question?

Is this a question that WCET, OLC, EDUCAUSE, or the National Council for Online Education could answer?

When have you been wrong lately?

Source:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/online-education-jobs-engine

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