Labor shortage worsening in Hungary

A new set of data are evidence that labour shortage is becoming an increasingly pressing problem in the Hungarian economy. The number of job vacancies grew by over 3,000 in the second quarter since the end of March 2016, portfolio.hu reports.

Unsurprisingly, the financial website says, most of the new job offerings were created in manufacturing, but the number of vacancies rose by almost as much in trade. Proportionately, the IT sector has the greatest lack of manpower.

The number of vacancies in the business sector leaped in the first quarter of 2016 and rose further in Q2. There were a total of 38,900 job vacancies in the April-June period, 2,800 more than in Q2 2015.

The labour shortage remains the gravest in the IT sector, where the ratio of vacant jobs edged up to 3.6% from 3.5%. In quantitative terms this means 3,000 IT jobs, which is clearly far from the truth because actually at least 22,000 IT professionals are missing from the local market.

In state-owned human health and social work activities, the vacancy rate is 3.3%, i.e. there are 6,800 vacant jobs.

In administrative and support service activities, the job vacancy rate rose to 2.7% from 2.4% in Q1, but the JVR also went up to 2.5% from 2.1% in professional, scientific and technical activities.