The ending of unemployment benefits in Seychelles has led to a rise in people searching for jobs, though the relaunching of the tourism sector has provided new employment opportunities, said a top official on Monday.
As of March, there were 1,121 jobseekers registered with the employment services section out of which 61 percent were females and 39 percent were males.
“The high number of jobseekers is attributed to phasing out of Unemployment Relief Scheme, Seychelles Employee Transition Scheme and increased in redundancies,” said Susan Morel, the chief policy analyst of the employment department.
Morel said that 782 jobseekers have been referred to businesses and 61 have been employed.
Since April the number of job seekers started to decline and only 312 applications were recorded and Morel said this is because there is less demand for redundancies as the expected increase in tourism arrivals is making businesses opt for salary reduction.
From January to March, the Department received 71 applications to lay off 346 employees.
Morel said that more Seychellois workers are being made redundant compared to non-Seychellois partly related to the size and composition of the workforce of companies applying for redundancy.
Morel said that “the COVID-19 pandemic has placed the employment sector at the centre of economic and social challenges. As a result, employment policies and programmes have been reviewed to adapt to the new realities.”
As part of a new strategy to ensure stability in the labour market, the Department of Employment aims to keep the population more informed.
“We have joined hands with the private sector to help them advertise their vacancies. We are targeting school dropouts to ensure that the youth are not left idle and are placed in employment,” said the Principal Secretary for Employment, Jules Baker.
“We are focusing on re-skilling as well. We have seen that there is a lot of vacancies in the agricultural and fisheries sector and a technical team will be set up to empower the community to seek a job in those sectors. We are also taking a new approach the Certificate of Entitlement for non-Seychellois workers with the aim to prioritise employment for Seychelles citizens,” added Baker.
He said that the Department is also “working on is how to create a system that will make it faster for the matching of people into employment. We want to introduce a centralise registration system that will have all information about any jobseeker concerning past employment. This will make it easy to place people into a job matching their qualification and experience.”
Source: Seychelles News Agency