“What has been done in the labor market would be very, very high in my personal rating of our government’s success if you asked us to take stock when our term comes to an end,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. emphasized during the discussion at the event “Career Days” of the State Employment Service (DYPA).

He noted that “we were able to modernize the organization known as OAED, which had many anchors, to adapt it to the needs of a labor market that is developing very quickly. And when we talk about needs, we are talking about the needs of businesses and employees.”

The Prime Minister added that it is very important that the participants in the specific discussion who shared their experience talk not about subsidized jobs, but about jobs in the market, and he congratulated the service, the governor, the ministry, the secretary general, because “now we have there is an employment service operating as a European standards company.”

Referring to the speech of one of the participants in the discussion, he stressed that there is a natural suspicion of business and workers when the state comes up with such an initiative, and “to a certain extent, we managed to overcome it.” He also noted that we need to overcome the suspicions of the employees themselves and emphasized the need for candidates to view this process as a bit of an educational process, pointing out that even if there is no result for someone who participates in Career Days, it is an important experience.

It’s about jobs that are good for business and creative for employees, he says, and that’s what Career Days can achieve.

He stressed the value of writing a resume and the importance of “how you conduct yourself in an interview”, urging the Service to conduct online related workshops that it already offers live.

“The stories we are hearing are the best live advertisement of the fact that this institution is working,” Mr. Mitsotakis emphasized in his next speech, noting that the whole discussion only concerns part of the work that DYPA does, although there are also subsidized jobs to be created in the next period, about 200,000, with significant resources from the Recovery Fund and the new NSRF. “We make no secret of the fact that our goal is to bring unemployment below 10% sometime in 2024,” the prime minister said, referring to a quite achievable goal.

“The next front, the big front that we have to face in the labor market, is about two aspects: first, how will we meet the needs of high-growth sectors such as tourism, where we see that there is already a big problem to find potential. And this is connected with the second big challenge – retraining and acquiring additional skills in an ever-changing labor market, ”he said.

He also stated that it is important to link training with certification in order to change the way even the employees themselves approach their training. In addition, the goal of all relevant programs is the eventual transformation of the unemployment subsidy into a work subsidy, and that all this is associated with a different philosophy. “With a different understanding of what it means to pursue an active employment policy compared to what happened in the past.”

Source: RES-IPE