The digital transformation of the current year has brought new urgency to technology-driven businesses. As a result, internet-based careers became an emergency during 2020, while industries like tourism, hospitality, real estate, and transport were in a bad break. The list of the most demanded professions during 2020 incorporated: software engineer, health care professional, digital product manager, cloud engineer, and cybersecurity professional.
“During upcoming 2021 we will not witness the drastic changes in professions. Consequently, data analysts, IT professionals, digital marketing strategist will still remain in top demand. In addition, HR will become one of the demanding professions because employee retention and maintenance of organization culture during remote work will be one of the keys for the companies,” Kristine Chikovani, HR Team Lead at my.ge, told BMG.
Coronavirus outbreak has prompted a sharp economic downturn in Georgia and around the world, says Chikovani. In her words, the highest level of restrictions on workers, workplaces, and national lockdown showed a significant impact on the labor market. “If we take a look at the global employment market we can find a decrease in employment and hours and the increase in unemployment. According to International Labor Organization (ILO), in Q1 2020, there was calculated a 5.4% fall in working hours worldwide, equating to 155 million jobs, in comparison to the Q4 of the last year. In the H2 of the year, there was projected a 4.9% decline in working hours, or 140 million job losses, compared to the Q4 2019”.
According to Chikovani, during the pandemic, we have witnessed massive layoffs mostly in the leisure and hospitality, food, and service industries. Waiters, Chefs, bartenders, casino and hotel employees are left without jobs or furloughed. Many office jobs also were reduced or cut. “For example demand for the office manager positions were declined or the nature of this job has been changed according to the company’s needs. Not only office jobs nature needed changes, but also the company’s business model has required an alteration because many of them find themselves out of work and others have transitioned a work from a home model and were relying on the technologies. Not surprisingly, the new environment itself led to the high demand for professions such software engineers, database administrators, digital product managers, web designers, AI engineers, cloud engineers, food delivery drivers, sales managers, healthcare professionals”.
During the current year, online job portal myjobs.ge showed the highest degree of a declined number of vacancies in the leisure and hospitality sector, agriculture, construction industries. Also, only a few vacancies related to arts, entertainment, and recreation were added.
The number of new vacancies at myjobs.ge was the lowest in April, only 9 vacant positions were posted on the portal during that time. Since June the situation started changing drastically and the economy began adding back such jobs that were lost during the lockdown. According to myjobs.ge statistics, the most active month with vacancies was September, the number of available positions has almost doubled in comparison to the same period of the prior year.
