EU Commission: Ten Most Developing Professions in Greece

The European Commission’s report on the monitoring of job vacancies in the EU during the second trimester of 2013, captured the large disparities in employment opportunities between the countries of southern and northern Europe. According to Commissioner László Andor, the mitigation of those disparities will come through the mobility of employees in the EU.

According to the European Employment Observatory (EEO), in southern European countries, most employment opportunities are concentrated in a few sectors such as health care, sale and administration.

In particular, the EEO estimates that the ten fastest developing professions are waiters and bartenders, nurses and midwives, unskilled workers, finance professionals, software developers, heavy truck and bus drivers, legal professions, transporters, clerks and food machine operators.

The European Commission highlights the “over-qualification” of the workforce in southern European countries, while more and more often recruited employees work in positions below their qualifications.

Another feature in southern European countries is the increase fixed-term employment contracts due to the ongoing economic recession. More specifically, during the last trimester of 2012, fixed-term workers represented 23 percent of the total in Greece and Spain. The report’s authors comment that this fact does not help the workforce in these countries improve their skill levels, resulting in low productivity rates. It is worth mentioning, that in southern Europe the low educated workers represent 33 percent of the total workforce versus the 16 percent of northern European countries.

The report notes that during the second trimester of 2013, the youth unemployment in Greece reached 59.6 percent, in Spain 55.7 percent, in Portugal 39.4 percent and in Italy 38.9 percent versus 24 percent in the rest EU’s countries.