Welcome to Sedefop's skill set and match podcast.

The European Year of Skills is getting near its conclusion and probably all aspects of skills

development, skills matching and deployment in relation to national and European Union policies have been given due attention.

One of the most salient of those aspects concerns micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, MSMEs, and the trouble they face when trying to recruit the skills they need

to remain competitive and grow.

There is a number of issues linked to the subject, most prominent, whether MSMEs are threatened

by a skills shortage, or it is their inbuilt limitations that prevent their access to skills,

and how governments and the EU

could help them ameliorate this situation.

Trying to make sense of these questions, I first turned to a researcher,

Sedefob's Giovanni Russo, who is an expert on the subject.

I asked him about the true nature of skills shortages

faced by MSMEs. I think what the research shows and survey evidence shows is that actually

organizations report difficulties in finding the skills they need. I think these difficulties are real,

but I think also that they be better characterized as recruitment problems rather than skill shortages.

For example, during the discussion at European Social Forum, the cause of the shortages was being on an attractive job.

So this observation is consistent with a view that put the problem

inside companies in the recruitment process rather than with a skill shortage narrative.

What is an unattractive job, if I may ask, Giovanni?

An attractive job usually is poor working condition, low pay, not particularly interested in jobs, repetitive

actions, tasks, lack of purpose in the job.

If you take a job and you split it up in small tasks and workers lose sight of the overall

...