2023-10-09 02:04:08
Spain has the highest unemployment rate in all of Europe, with 11.7%, with the aggravating factor that of the 2.8 million unemployed, 464,000 are under 25 years of age, 27.4%, the highest rate. between the Twenty-seven and double the euro zone average (13.8%). With these premises, everything indicates that something is not working, things are not being done well or the labor reform has not had the expected effect on youth hiring, despite the fact that in the last year it has dropped from the 31.8% that registered in August 2022 at 4.4 points, reaching 27.4%.
These poor prospects for young Spaniards have many consequences and innumerable implications for their future employment. Thus, Spain is at the bottom of the employment rate among recent European graduates. 82% of those who finish their studies in the European Union between 20 and 34 years old were employed in 2022 – according to the latest official statistics with annual data –, a rate that increased seven percentage points compared to 2014 and recovered the levels from before of the pandemic, since in 2018 and 2019 it was 81%. However, this percentage drops to 79% in the Spanish case and is placed next to the countries with the worst percentage, Italy (65%), Greece (66%) and Romania (70%), and light years away from the States that lead the list: Luxembourg and the Netherlands (both 93%), Germany (92%) and Malta (91%).
According to Eurostat, disparities in employment rates can be explained by the nature of the fields studied, since there are differences in labor market demand, that is, there are countries that better adapt their study programs to the needs of the labor market. , preventing vacancies from skyrocketing, a problem that in the Spanish case, however, has become accentuated in recent years.
Go abroad
Another difference that distances the young Spanish labor market from that of Germany, the Netherlands or France is that only a minority of young Spaniards between 25 and 29 years old choose to go to work abroad and then return with greater experience and training and develop their skills. professional career in Spain, a type of experience valued by companies and that helps to have better working conditions.
According to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), in 2021 – the latest year available – 19,622 young people with higher education left Spain, a figure that represents 0.77% of the total citizens between 25 and 29 years old (2.5 million ). In 2020, influenced by the pandemic, the percentage was 0.55%, and a year before, in 2019, the proportion was 0.74%. This emigration has been diluting since 2015 until there are around 2,000 net departures, which means that only one in every 1,000 young people leaves each semester.
In this sense, a study by Education First shows that having taken an English course abroad reduces the probability of being long-term unemployed – more than 24 months looking for work – by 39%, while multiplying the chances of being unemployed by five. chances that young people between 25 and 30 years old have salaries of around 35,000 euros. This advantage has led to an increase of up to 20% in the demand to go abroad to learn languages and make this training compatible with either work or internships.
For the director of Randstad Research, Valentín Bote, in a hiring process, a candidate who has worked abroad “has more value for the human resources teams” of companies.
Jobs far from their training
The third of the big problems that young Spaniards face when they finish their studies is that two thirds of them do not work in what they studied (63.47%), while up to 56% claim that at least on occasion they have developed a professional activity without a legal contract, which is why the majority believe that Spain is a country “more hostile” to youth than other States of the European Union. These are some of the conclusions of a survey commissioned by the USO union, which determines that although higher education is key to accessing the labor market and acquiring experience – 97% of those who have it have already worked at some point – it is also There is a lot of pessimism that advancing in training does not guarantee a better position (65.25%) and 84.44% of those who are currently studying a postgraduate degree are convinced that it will not help them improve at work. The panorama that young people draw about their contractual situation leaves many gaps that remain unresolved. 77.63% claim to have carried out tasks that were not their responsibility and were overqualified for the work they did; 69.32% have suffered from work overload, and two out of every three young people have worked overtime without being paid. In fact, 20.84% of those under 30 years of age have had this happen repeatedly. Likewise, 54.92% have worked one or more times without a contract, especially those without education (86.67%), and half of the young population (51.5%) have worked at some time without remuneration.
The problem is exacerbated by the serious added obstacle that the Spanish labor market has to fill the vacancies that companies demand. With almost 3.5 million unemployed and inactive people on the SEPE lists, and although it may seem like a contradiction, in Spain thousands of jobs are demanded every day that are not filled due to lack of qualified personnel. Up to 150,000 vacancies are left unfilled each year due to lack of candidates, one job vacancy for every 100 employees, an all-time high. In the new technologies sector alone there would be more than 120,0000 digital profile vacancies that companies are unable to fill.
Age and emptied Spain
For this reason, the SME employers’ association, Cepyme, warns that in 16% of cases the hiring is not carried out because the company is in a depopulated area of Spain; that the average age of employees in 12 of the 20 branches of activity exceeds 44 years, with five branches of activity where the average age exceeds 46 – data that contrasts with those of 2008, when the branch of activity with the oldest age was that of agriculture and livestock, at 43 years old–; and that there is increasingly less young population of working age, a problem exacerbated because the proportion of those who want to work (activity rate) has fallen 11.5 percentage points, dropping to 36.9%. Every year there are 38,000 fewer young people in the labor market due to the drop in birth rates.
Cepyme points out that this situation is a serious problem for SMEs and for some branches of activity, such as information and communications, professional activities, transportation, finance and insurance. This weakness is also evident in areas such as hospitality and construction, closely linked to the Spanish production model. For this reason, Cepyme calls for “a multi-ministerial treatment that involves various Administrations and entities and that offers a basic solution.” Meanwhile, young Spaniards continue to be at the forefront of European recruitment and employment.
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