One in five jobs hard to fill in Italy in Q1: forecast

One out of five employees Italian firms plan to hire in the first quarter of 2017 may be difficult to find, an official forecast showed on Monday.

Some 40 percent of all the hardest-to-fill jobs would concern professionals, almost 30 percent technicians, and 25 percent skilled workers, according to a quarterly survey by national information system Excelsior.

The study, carried out by the Italian Union of the Chambers of Commerce in cooperation with the Labor Ministry, refers to 97,000 interviews among private firms.

Overall, the demand of professionals would increase to 22 percent of total recruitment demand, compared to 17 percent in the Q1 2016, the survey showed.

Within professional occupations, the job demand of engineers and architects was expected to be hard to fill in 56 percent of the cases up to March 2017. It would be followed by the difficulty to recruit executives (53 percent), natural sciences experts (49 percent), professionals in the health sector (46 percent), and experts in economics and business management (41 percent).

The problem of matching labor demand and supply has often been registered in Italy, and especially for highly qualified professionals and for skilled workers.

Yet, the issue had recently subdued also because of the economic crisis affecting the country in the last years.

Unemployment remains high in Italy, which is the third largest economy in the eurozone, despite job market reforms recently implemented and a still timid recovery.

The jobless rate rose to 11.9 percent in November 2016 from 11.7 percent in the previous month, according to the latest available data by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). It was the highest level registered since June 2015. Endit