Employment growth in private firms slows down

Employment growth in privately held businesses (PHBs) in the country went down last year as employers are having a hard time getting qualified workers, an international survey showed.

The International Business Report (IBR) conducted by the Grant Thornton International showed that employment in PHB grew by a slower six percent last year, two notches lower than the eight percent growth recorded in 2006.

“There are available jobs out there, but what’s happening is that employers are having a hard time finding people with the right skills sets to fill up these positions,” said Greg Navarro, P&A managing partner and CEO.

According to Navarro, this is a result of the continuing migration of Filipino workers.

“We’re seeing our engineers leaving for Russia and the Persian Gulf states, our journalists moving to Singapore and the UAE, and our geologists moving to China and Australia . And at the rate they are leaving, the employers they leave behind are having to play catch-up: they have to match that pace when they search for, and train, people to replace these workers. That’s a tall order,” Navarro said.

Earlier results from the IBR show that 58 percent of Filipino business leaders are having a difficult time expanding their businesses due to a lack of skilled workers in the country, making the Philippines the top three country globally whose business growth is limited most by human resource problem.

Figures show that last year, 924,000 new jobs were generated in the Philippines, more than enough to accommodate the 749,000 new entrants to the labor force that same year.

Meanwhile, global employment in PHB went up four percent in 2007 better than the three percent recorded the previous year.

Regionally, East Asia showed the highest increase at eight percent.

The Employment Growth Index is formed from responses given in the Grant Thornton IBR. It is determined by calculating the absolute increases and decreases in employment reported by businesses and then calculating the year-on-year head count change as a percentage for each population as a whole.