Lack of qualified persons, limited workforce key weaknesses in Guyana’s oil and gas industry – New ILO report

Dec 20, 2022 News

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By Renay Sambach

Kaieteur News – While Guyana’s oil resources have placed it among the top petroleum producers in the world, the country’s lack of technical expertise and workforce capacity continue to be a bugbear.

Despite this, the Government of Guyana (GoG) earlier this year gave American oil giant, ExxonMobil, the green light for the fourth project (US$10B Yellowtail Development Project) and Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo, has been pushing for oil companies to go faster. On the other hand, Exxon has already begun awarding US multimillion dollar contracts for the fifth project which has not yet been approved by the government.

At a time when the Government is looking to accelerate the oil and gas industry – a new report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has highlighted the gap between Guyana’s labour force capacity and what will be needed to handle the oil boom. It was also stated that the country lacks qualified human resources.

In fact, it was underscored that over 80 percent of the total working age of Guyana’s population did not go beyond upper secondary education and the required workforce that will be needed in the coming years, is six times Guyana’s current workforce capacity.

The ILO findings on the challenges were highlighted in its report titled, “Prospective occupational skills needs in the Guyanese oil and gas industry, 2022-2026” which was published on Monday. There was a virtual handover ceremony of the ILO’s report in the presence of Minister of Labour, Joseph Hamilton and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Guyana and Coordination Office for the Caribbean.

According to the report, ‘Availability of qualified human resources’ is a key bugbear to the country’s development.  It was explained that the Guyanese economy would have to overcome the aforementioned in order to fully benefit from the oil boom.

“Although oil and gas operations employ a wide range of jobs, including those occupations associated with low(er) skills level 6, an important proportion of the job openings require at least a higher technical or vocational degree,” it was stated in the report. In contrast, it was stated that the gross school enrollment ratio at tertiary level for Guyana is only about 12 percent, which is much lower than the average 44 percent in other Latin America and the Caribbean countries.

Also published in the report, was a figure which showed the distribution of educational attainment (in thousands) for the total working age population as derived from the labour force survey performed during the third quarter of 2021.

It was also stated in the report that between 1965 and 2000, almost 90 percent of Guyanese nationals with a tertiary level education, and 40 percent of those with a secondary level education emigrated. As such, it was noted that a continuation of such trend may affect the labour supply available to the oil and gas industry.

Another hampering factor is the ‘Quantitatively limited workforce.’ According to the report, although the quality of available human capital is certainly worrisome, it is not the only constraint in Guyana. “Quantitatively, Guyana’s labour force is not big enough to serve the expected growth of the economy,” it was stated.

According to the ILO, the labour demand driven by the oil and gas sector and its support services in Guyana for the forthcoming years is estimated to be 260,000 workers, while Guyana’s national potential labour force is estimated to be a mere 39,342. Importantly, even under a hypothetical scenario where all unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers are trained, retrained, and up-skilled, to become employed the demand will still outstrip supply in the medium-term.

Back in May, Richard Rambarran, an economist and executive member of the Georgetown Chambers of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), was reported in the media making similar sentiments.

Rambarran had said, “Even if we take all of the persons in Guyana who are unemployed, underemployed and even those, the ones that we call in labour economics, disguised unemployed, we still do not have enough persons in this country to serve the productive growth sector or where we are intended to grow over the medium term.”

Kaieteur News had reported that the economist highlighted that from research, it was gathered that based on where Guyana is going in the medium-term, the country will still require all of those persons who are unemployed, underemployed and disguised unemployed to enter into the labour market and in addition to that about 100,000 more persons will still be needed.  “So we need everybody, everyone in this country to have a job, participate in the formal structure in the economy but also we need 100,000 more people,” Rambarran had said.

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