New Zealand is suffering from an Underemployment Crisis

February 24, 2018

There are jobs in New Zealand but no one to fill them. There are people in the country who want to work in those jobs but can’t because they aren’t skilled enough for them. At the same time, there are more than skilled for jobs there are currently holding. Looking at this situation, one can say that New Zealand is suffering from an underemployment crisis.

Universities need to step up their game to design courses in ways that help the job industry. According to the New Zealand government, the current underemployment rate is 6.3 percent. It was only 4.5 percent at the end of the last quarter on December 31, 2017. Around 122,000 people are underutilized, and there’s a difference of 12.1 percent between the demand the supply of labor. In the statistics given by Statistics New Zealand, you can see that 340,000 people have more potential to work. Paul Dales, economist, Capital Economics chief, said that the increase in underutilization rate suggests there are people the job industry isn’t finding that can reduce the underemployment rate.

In its December 2017 issue, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research wrote that companies find it very difficult to find the correct candidate for a job opening. People come in with a variety of skills but don’t have more of the required skill. 49 percent companies find it challenging to find skilled labor while 31 percent difficulty in finding unskilled labor. However, even they wrote that the difference between the underemployment and underutilization rates say that there are still workers that the company hasn’t found. Christina Leung, the economist, NZIER, said that a lot of it depends on skill matching.

Attracting foreign labor

The government opened seven building-related skilled professions to fill the gap between demand and supply. They want to focus on inviting foreign skilled labor with the necessary skills to complete the market.

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