THE Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) has come out in full support of importing foreign labour to plug a shortage in skilled labour in certain sectors of the economy.

Keith Duncan, president of the PSOJ said on Friday that the powerful lobby group “accepts and endorses the recommendation…to initially leverage foreign talent for higher value services which can seed the local skill pool, which can create a base for training local talent by knowledge transfer.”

Duncan, in giving his endorsement, referenced a World Bank recommendation on the issue that has been at the top of discussion points since Prime Minister Andrew Holness floated the idea of bringing in foreign labour to fill skills gap in the labour force.

He was speaking on Friday at the AC Marriott in St Andrew where the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group launched the Country Private Sector Diagnostic for Jamaica.

“With unemployment at 6.2 per cent, the lowest rate in Jamaica’s history, we in the private sector are now experiencing tremendous difficulty in filling jobs in tourism, construction, technology, management, and other areas,” Duncan continued.

He said the deficit in labour and skill sets will create a ceiling on investments and growth if Jamaica doesn’t devise strategies in the short term and longer term to address “this real structural deficit”.

Duncan’s sentiments were echoed by IFC regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean Martin Spicer in an interview with the Jamaica Observer shortly after the launch.

“Bringing in talented labour can help train Jamaican labour to improve their skill set,” Spicer said.

“It’s not a threat to have foreign workers here but more an opportunity to learn from them through engagement at the company level,” he added.

Tatiana Nenova, IFC manager, economics, who was also a part of the interview, pointed out that Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke, who spoke at the event “ announced they want to look at the visa programmes and reform that in order to attract foreigners into Jamaica”.

For Duncan: “This approach will help to bridge the short- to medium-term skill gap over 2-5 years while we build the capacity of our secondary, vocational, and tertiary institutions to meet the needs of the private sector and to equip, train, and upskill our youth and labour force to meet the needs of the fast-emerging knowledge-based digital economy.”

“The PSOJ is therefore calling for a public-private partnership working group in the short term to examine these issues and to make recommendations around the changes required in immigration policy and labour laws to address this growing deficit in the labour market,” Duncan said.

The IFC, in its report launched on Friday, pointed out that in a 2018 survey 84 per cent of employers in Jamaica said that recruiting appropriately skilled people was a major challenge. The employers reported then that the main underlying problems for recruitment are the limited number of candidates with occupation-specific skills and soft skills (for example, leadership, customer service, communication, and emotional intelligence). Companies engaged in agriculture, technology, creative fields, and tourism experience this problem more than those in education, construction, manufacturing, health care, and mining.

It also highlighted that interviews with Scotiabank show that only 30 per cent of job candidates had the required skills.

Despite Jamaica ranking above regional peers in the skills of the current workforce (60th out of

141 countries) and the skills of the future workforce (74th out of 141 countries), high-growth sectors face difficulties when recruiting.

The digital services and outsourcing sector, which has created more than 44,000 direct and 88,000 indirect jobs, is especially constrained by the short supply of skilled labour, the report outlined.

It went on to warn that such shortages may limit the growth of information technology business process outsourcing in the long run.

So far, to combat the skills gap, firms in sectors such as tourism and business process outsourcing have been internalising the costs of training to create their own labour pools.

The IFC report pointed out that even though some firms are doing their own training, overall spending on worker training is low in Jamaica, with only 26 per cent of firms in the island offering training, compared to 51 per cent, on average, in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It also called for tertiary level institutions to tailor their programmes to meet the demands of the workforce.

A call was also made for the country to initiate a reverse “brain drain” by capitalising on the potential of Jamaica’s Diaspora.

“The Government has made various efforts to facilitate reintegration of the Diaspora, but the domestic job market does not offer the conditions and opportunities needed to incentivise their return,” the report highlighted.

A 2017 survey of the Jamaican Diaspora found that 58 per cent of respondents reported having a tertiary education, with 29 per cent having a first degree, 23 per cent a master’s degree, and six per cent a doctoral degree. The most common area of specialisation was entrepreneurship (12 per cent), followed by education (11 per cent), and medicine (nine per cent). Most of those surveyed were in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The IFC said efforts to overcome skills mismatches in Jamaica — especially in high-value economic activities — should focus on fine-tuning existing institutions and systems, making labour market programmes more responsive to private sector demand and strengthening labour market monitoring and evaluation.

These efforts, it said, should:

— anticipate areas of job growth based on stronger connections with employers and

investors, and through strategic sector promotion efforts;

— deepen collaboration with industry boards and private sector leaders on curriculum design and training delivery;

— develop tailored, demand-driven programmes for existing and future labour demand. Explore additional opportunities for digital learning as a flexible source of continuous learning or for acquiring skills. E-learning programmes must come with appropriate support to ensure correct use and optimal outcomes;

— strengthen coordination among training providers (to reduce fragmentation) and improve information available to institutions, job seekers, and employers; and

— improve and increase the use of monitoring and evaluation for labour market interventions.

These activities should be complemented by broader social protection measures (such as unemployment insurance) and the introduction of social programmes to improve the marketability of at-risk youth.