How has labour demand shifted as a result of the health crisis?

Isabelle Schlesser: What we’ve seen is more of a decline in the volume of the job offers since the beginning of the crisis. Starting from March 2020, the drop was very sharp at the beginning, [but] over the last two months [March and April 2021], nearly 3,000 new job offers are declared every month, a good trend.

The situation is very different from one sector to another... In April 2019, we had 600 job offers in the [hospitality] sector. Now, we have 400, but it’s not like it was six months ago, where we had nearly nothing. The retail sector is also not as it was before, but sectors like construction are really boom[ing], [also] the health-related and cleaning sectors.

Long-term unemployment seems to have been particularly impacted.

Two difficult points were youth unemployment and long-term unemployment. When we look at the figures for the young unemployed, the trend is very positive. It’s always like that after a crisis: at the beginning, young people suffer, but when the market grows again, they’re the first ones hired.

Long-term unemployed [registered more than one year] are half of all our customers, more than 9,000 people. It’s the highest figure we’ve ever had in Luxembourg... as a public employment service, it’s our challenge to offer employment measures to help develop employability, training, coaching, etc., to open perspectives again.

Do job seekers have new demands? 

Job seekers aren’t classical employees: they have no job, so they are more about finding a new job, whatever it takes... Luxembourg used to have a good job market--and I hope it will again--but now we’ve had months where nothing happened to these people. 

From a financial point of view, it’s a very difficult situation. You have no certainty about the evolution of the situation, how long it will last, no [or less] financial resources... people are becoming stressed, feel powerless, lost, desperate...

Another thing we see [which is] more positive is that people are more open to change their career... We have people who used to work in restaurants or hotels and, on the other hand, we have a very strong demand for bus drivers... [they] opened up and said, ‘perhaps [being] a bus driver would be a good thing for me’. These people are used to working shifts, having contact with customers, so they have skills that could also be important [as] bus drivers... We have to retrain people because everybody knows that the labour market is changing very quickly. 

Are employers demanding different skill sets? 

Digital skills, of course, but also more soft skills, the capacity to adapt quickly to new situations because the situation is so uncertain also for employers, [so] they need employees who can cope with this... employers nowadays insist very much on communication skills, too.

How has Adem pivoted as a result of the health crisis? 

We’re a company like any other, so it hit us hard, mostly because we used to [place] a lot of importance on the physical contact between the job seeker and the advisor… all of a sudden, we had to change... we’d already planned this before the pandemic, but it accelerated [the digitalisation]... now, it works well, [and] it’s easier for the advisor and customer. 

The other biggest challenge was short-time work, where we’re doing the financial part, paying out subsidies… but now I think all our other digitalisation programmes will go much quicker than planned.  

This article was originally published in the Delano July 2021 print edition.