24 - 30 August 2000

Training people and establishing the needs of the country's workforce

The Employment and Training Corporation is marking its 10th anniversary in October with the organisation for the first time of an Employment Week. The Corporation's CEO, JOHN CAMILLERI, spoke to David Kelleher about the ETC's role and future plans

How has the ETC evolved over the past 10 years and what are its various roles?

The Corporation was set up 10 years ago after the law was published on 3 August 1990, as a successor to the Labour Office. Unfortunately, many people still refer to us as an extension of the Labour Office, but this is certainly not the case.

The ETC has many different roles. Apart from training people and establishing the needs of the country's workforce, the ETC has a very important task in collecting statistics on employment in Malta. We are proud to say that the way we collect data and provide it to those who require this information has been the envy of other European countries. This is the view of the European Training Foundation.

Over the years, the ETC has done its utmost to change the public's perception of the corporation and its role. We continuously strive to introduce new initiatives in the fields of employment and training. While this has been a major contribution, on the basis of the statistics we provided, economic decisions affecting the labour market have been taken.

Central Office of Statistics (COS) have just completed the first Labour Force survey, in line with what other European countries do and what Eurostat requires from member States. The results of the survey should be ready by next October and the COS is planning to carry out four surveys a year, as is the case in the UK. We need time to reach this level but we have to.

In the meantime, we still do headcounts, as each employer is bound to inform us when an employee joins the company or leaves his job. The only problem is that not all employers file their forms immediately, although the law states they must do so within four working days. Such delays hinder our job at collecting more precise labour market statistics.

The Corporation has been looked at as a "job maker". Is this the case? How has the labour market developed over the past 10 years?

The ETC is not there to create jobs. That is not our role. The corporation was set up to offer help to jobseekers and to train them to become more employable. Employers are also our customers. ETC has a role of matchmaking. Our job is to find the right employees for the right employer.

The ETC also firmly believes in helping people to find new opportunities and to acquire new skills. Studying the various trends in the labour market should help us to fulfil this role. It is useless waiting until you need 1,000 engineers or 1,000 nurses. You cannot work that way. We have to train ahead of market needs. We have trained personnel indicated by market trends. We are always on the look out where new opportunities are developing, what vacancies will be available. For example, the proposed Cottonera development and the new hospital. We are trying to see what opportunities will be available and what employers will be looking for. We are looking ahead, although the health

services sector is a difficult area to predict.

Two areas that the ETC is presently actively looking into are online gaming and Information Technology, especially the latter. In fact, over the past year we have given a lot of importance to IT training and are constantly developing new courses both for programmers and hardware specialists.

Yet the government does not seem to be doing so much in the local IT scene? Is the ETC filling in the gaps?

We are an organisation that was set up to train people and not to create jobs. We are there to make people employable. In fact, as part of our business plan for the next three years, we have developed a national plan for an IT literate workforce. We are fully aware that the majority of jobs will be in the IT sector. Therefore we are hoping to train 1,000 persons in IT orientations skills a year. The courses are developed for those who know nothing about computers and provide tuition on basic computer skills and Internet use.

These courses have also helped people to increase their self-esteem and realise that they are capable of doing something else in life. People from all walks of life have participated in a pilot project of these courses. Some women, who otherwise would have ended up as cleaners, were re-trained in basic office skills and re-employed.

In the light of this experience, we are planning to set up Community Centres in Information Technology. The idea is to use existing premises such as schools in the evenings or corporate companies that would like to take part. We hope to have around 10 community centres next year. This is not enough but at least it is a beginning.

The ETC does not want duplication, so we are working hand-in-hand with the Malta Council for Science and Technology.

A new logo, a new website. Why the need to change?

Every organisation has to stop and think every now and then. Ten years have passed since the ETC was set up and we felt that it was time to examine what had been done and what could be done to further improve our service.

We carried out an Operations Review of the whole corporation and this has now been finalised. The end result of the review is the formulation of a three-year business plan.

Before joining the ETC last October, I had looked up information on similar organisations within the European Union.

I found that Ireland had a similar organisation and it was so successful that we decided to request FAS (The Training and Employment Authority of Ireland) to assist us in our task

Over the past year, nine experts from FAS were in Malta to help us in the operations review and to draft the business plan for 2000-2003. The board of directors has already discussed and approved the first draft and next month we will be having a meeting of the ETC Clients' Forum to discuss the draft business plan. At the end of the day, the government has to fund our business plan and the response from government up to now has been very positive. I am confident that this response will be reflected in the next ETC budget. The ETC should be a catalyst for change.

However, we must also change according to changes in the economy, and the globalisation of the labour markets. Whether we are in the EU or not, this change is necessary. In fact, the effects of membership in the World Trade Organisation will most probably be greater than EU membership.

We tend to forget the WTO but there is no way we cannot follow certain trends that are already evolving. Our job is to prepare the workforce and prepare them for the challenges of the future.

With regards to Malta and the EU, four pillars of EU employment strategy have been developed following the 1997 Luxembourg summit. These are: employability, adaptability, entrepreneurship, and equal opportunities. Each member State has to prepare a National Action Plan for Employment every year and the European Commission then reviews the performance against the plan. No country wants to be criticised so they do their utmost to implement what they said in the plan.

Our role is to see what is happening in the EU and try to reach these standards. They are not imposed but recommended and accepted by all.

The business plan is now ready. What, in your opinion, are the factors that hinder the ETC's work?

The ETC works in an area that is affected by different and changing trends. It is not possible to say "I will need 100 nurses tomorrow". We did not have a unit that was trained to foresee trends in the labour market and this was a drawback. Now we will be establishing this unit to identify trends and in which areas jobs are going to be created.

In certain cases, the ETC requires the help of other government divisions, such as that for education. Apprenticeship schemes have to be examined in detail. It is useless training people for a trade that is slowly dying.

One thing that I have learnt through experience is that sometimes we request high entry requirements for certain courses which are higher than those really needed.

Thus, one can say that the main problems faced by the ETC have been a lack of research and lack of training of our employees in specialist areas. We are now addressing these problems head on and will continue to do over the next three years.

There are a number of job centres in Malta and Gozo. What is their main function?

The job centres have been quite useful but people have grumbled that our head office is not at the heart of the community. Admittedly, Hal Far is a bit far away for some. We intend to develop Job Centres into regional centres. There will be four Regional Centres, three in Malta and one in Gozo. Apart from providing the services offered today, the regional centres will provide other services that to date could only be found at Hal Far.

Another project in the pipeline is the setting up of job clubs at the job centres. When a young man or woman comes to the ETC to seek employment, we first give the person a chance to look for a job himself. We just give a few guidelines.

After a few weeks, if that person is still unemployed, we help that individual by developing a job plan for him/her and providing basic skills training in writing a CV and how to sit for an interview.

The idea of the job clubs is to offer a meeting place for these people to practise what they have learnt before applying for a job or going for an interview. These skills will be taught over a period of six weeks, two sessions per week.

Do people waste the ETC's time and abuse of the system?

We do not put a label on anyone. Each individual who requires our help receives it. However, there are those who abuse of the system and our role is to prevent this. Over the past few months we have beefed up our inspectorate and our law enforcement unit. Each month around 60/70 persons are stuck off the register because they were working while declaring they were unemployed. Our people are trained to notice certain indicators, however we need help from employers and the public.

There have been cases when people sent to interviews blatantly told the employer they did not want the job. It is impossible to have an inspector at each interview so we need feed back from employers. They have to report to ETC such cases.

We are also concerned about the number of underage workers in Malta. To date we have found 85 underage employees in the month of August, and considering the size of the local workforce, this is a considerable figure.

We are basically a service organisation. We want to be an ally to our clients: jobseekers and employers alike. We do not want to overemphasise our policing role however we will spare no effort to check abuses.