Ground-breaking reform at the ETC

The Employment and Training Corporation will operate the concept of ‘Open Data’ by introducing proven technology which enables automatic matching of CVs (including skills and competences) with job vacancies; a career platform where each citizen can manage his/her own career. Moreover the ETC will also provide free screening of CVs by professionals promptly for greater employability.

The new system being adopted by the ETC will allow both jobseekers and employers to have online, direct but confidentiality-secured access to all that on a 24/7 basis.

In these past 25 years the ETC has worked successfully on EU Funded Schemes such as the Employment Aid Programmes (EAP) and the Training Aid Framework (TAF); indeed job retention rates after a period of three years still averaged the very satisfactory rate of 82%.
But this was not enough and we have to implement several changes to rectify what does not seem to be working. For example, we seem to have a problem on Job placements – out of around 17,000 vacancies notified to it annually, the ETC only manages to place directly some 3,000 workers (18%). We have to enforce compliance as the public does not believe that the ETC effectively deters both locals and foreigners from working illegally. We must work on inclusion of persons with disability, ex-convicted persons and reformed abusers into Malta’s workforce. On these issues we are at the bottom of the European league.

I am confident that a sizeable majority of the less partisan among us will admit that the employment sector is generically ‘headed the right way’, with all segments of full-time employment other than agriculture and fishing showing satisfactory increases. Part-time employment has also increased consistently, almost exclusively within the female cohort. Unemployment is at record lows compared with European countries. But we cannot be complacent. We still need to get persons with disability into jobs, and former inmates of the Corradino Correctional Facility and those who have been substance abusers.

We also need to ensure that the ETC moves with the times and becomes relevant for those seeking a job in the middle to high segment of the labour market. We must work hand in hand with the private sector and civil society: both for job placement and for training.
Malta’s labour market would further benefit from a re-birth of a fresh, client-friendly national employment specialist service agency remodelled from the ashes of the second-rate bureaucracy that the Employment and Training Corporation became over a period of 25 years.

This is a ground breaking and comprehensive reform. We now have a young team coupled with the input of mature and experienced personnel. It is very much ‘work-in-progress’ at ETC and I am convinced that we will continue to register progress on the tangible service improvements that the corporation’s users have already begun to talk about.