Barbados risks worsening skills shortages and economic mismatches unless it urgently undertakes a nationwide labour demand survey, a leading workforce expert has warned.
Professor Dwayne Devonish told a Barbados Employers’ Confederation roundtable on Wednesday that, while labour force surveys measuring employment and skills supply are regularly conducted, the country lacks data on which jobs employers are actually struggling to fill.
“We’re not [looking into] what jobs are vacant, what skills are being sought, what’s going unfilled. You need both sides to get a true picture of the labour market,” he said.
“When you combine that with supply data, you get what’s called a labour market needs assessment.”
Professor Devonish said the absence of such data could lead to continued mismatches between what graduates are trained for and what the economy needs, contributing to brain drain and underemployment.
Drawing on his work in St Vincent and the Grenadines, he said a labour demand survey helped that country adjust its technical training programmes to meet the needs of incoming hotel investments.
He recommended Barbados follow suit and make the exercise routine to better align its immigration, education and workforce policies.
“We need to know if we’re training people for jobs that don’t exist, or whether there are shortages we’re not filling locally. Policy should be led by evidence,” he said.
Further adding that educational reform must also reflect real labour market needs, he said, “You can’t talk about economic diversification if you’re not also diversifying education.”
“Otherwise, students graduate into saturated sectors, and employers still can’t find the skills they need.”
Devonish also cautioned that, across the region, tensions sometimes emerge when locals perceive that expatriates are dominating high-paying jobs, even where foreign labour is needed.
He referred to recent research in the Cayman Islands, where a large foreign workforce has led to increasing calls by locals for greater protection in the private sector.
“That’s not unique to Cayman. We’ve seen it across the region,” he said.
“And if we’re serious about managed migration, we have to go beyond the paperwork and look at how people feel, how they see each other.”
Immigration officer Jennifer Callender, who also addressed the session and reported a rise in work permit applications in 2024, driven by demand in construction, healthcare and agriculture, noted that the Immigration Department had so far received no official complaints suggesting that Barbadians were being displaced.
“We don’t really have any complaints… or we have not received any complaints officially to state that persons are being disadvantaged in our local labour market,” she said.
(SM)
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