There is a higher recruitment drive in Zimbabwe’s engineering and related sectors due to skills flight than in any other sector, the state-controlled Herald reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper’s survey showed that since the beginning of the year, the engineering field has accounted for 47% of job advertisements in the press, while safety, health and environment has accounted for 20%, education for 12%, the medical field for 3%, finance and marketing for 11% and secretarial and administration for 7%.
Mining firms accounted for the highest number of ads for the engineering sector ”because of the development taking place in the sector and generally the replacement of lost skills”.
Peter Kipps of Kipps Employment Agency told the Herald that companies across all sectors were losing people all the time, but artisans were emigrating to South Africa where there are big construction opportunities because of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
”Obviously the main reason would be that some of these countries are offering better conditions, but the major drawback is that local companies cannot afford to increase salaries in light of the rising production cost base.”
Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company managing director Ernest Muchayi said that Zimbabwe’s state-run power company, Zesa Holdings, as a whole had been hit by a flight of engineers to neighbouring and overseas countries.
The new global economy is being built around talented people with special knowledge and skills and measures taken to offset existing incentives for skilled or highly educated people to emigrate have unfortunately had an almost zero success rate because of the weak currency, the Herald said.
Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries president Callisto Jokonya said that there was ”too much brain drain to the extent that policymakers cannot ignore such a phenomenon”.
”We are losing even the science teachers who train technicians,” he said. — Sapa