Job opportunities in pig farming and greenhouse farming greatest

The continuing economic growth is increasingly causing personnel shortages. This is also the case in the North Limburg agrofood and green sector. The ageing population and a limited influx of students, especially of intermediate vocational level, are at the basis of this. This is what the UWV writes in its publication Region in View.

Regio in Beeld is the annual publication by the UWV on all labour market regions in the Netherlands. Current figures and graphs show per region the opportunities and bottlenecks for employers and job seekers. Because new technologies require different skills and knowledge, the need for highly educated people in North Limburg has increased over the past ten years. The opportunities for job seekers therefore increase as the level of education rises.

Most employment (at all levels) is in pig farming and greenhouse horticulture, but there is also a high demand for gardeners. To meet this demand, employers are increasingly looking more broadly at people's competencies. They offer training and work experience programs to get people interested in the sector.

Mismatch

It is not only the agri-food and green sector that is facing this challenge. More and more employers are experiencing production barriers due to the lack of sufficient suitable personnel. In mid-2018, the shortage is moving towards the level of 2008, just before the economic recession. Yet many people are still standing by the side. For example, North Limburg still has 5,300 people on unemployment benefits, while there are 4,900 vacancies. According to Don Thijssen, regional manager of UWV North Limburg, this has to do with a "mismatch": the number of job seekers who seamlessly match the vacancies that appear is still minimal, according to him. "Every job seeker does have a distance to the formulated question. Or to put it another way, you could also say - and perhaps this is more appropriate - that the demand on the labor market has a distance to the supply," says Thijssen.

For the full publication on the North Limburg region click here