Teaching ranks as the hardest occupation to fill on average among EU countries covered by the OECD’s Mapping Skill Shortages in OECD Countries report, followed by health professionals and information and communications technology professionals. Health associate professionals and business and administration professionals complete the top five. Labourers are the easiest to recruit, followed by elementary workers, food preparation assistants, sales workers and assemblers.
The OECD’s index compares occupations within each country, with positive scores pointing to relative shortages and negative scores to relative surpluses. The scores show how hard jobs are to fill compared with other occupations in the same country and do not count vacancies or missing workers. The data are from 2024 for most countries.
Teachers are among the five hardest occupations to fill in 13 countries, while health professionals and ICT professionals each appear in 12 countries. Labourers are among the five easiest occupations to fill in 14 countries, followed by food preparation assistants in 12 and other clerical workers in 11.
Health professionals are hard to find in 23 of the 27 countries studied, while health associate professionals are in short supply in 21. Teachers are hard to find in 21 countries, with Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Spain and Turkey classing teaching as broadly in balance. ICT professionals and business and administration professionals are hard to find in 18 countries each.
Paul De Raeve and Manuel Ballotta of the European Federation of Nurses Associations told Euronews Business that EU and European healthcare systems are unable to retain and recruit nurses at the frontline of care, leading to extensive nursing shortages everywhere. They cited high patient-to-nurse ratios, unsafe working conditions, widespread mental health problems, low pay, limited career prospects, a lack of professional recognition and frequent exposure to harassment and violence.
Dr Ole Johan Bakke, president of the Standing Committee of European Doctors, said doctors across Europe are increasingly expected to compensate for systemic workforce shortages through excessive working hours and increased workloads. He said violence against healthcare professionals further compounds these problems and contributes to burnout, making medicine less attractive as a lifelong career.
Daniel Wisniewski, secretary general of the European Federation of Education Employers, said teacher shortages increasingly concern the long-term attractiveness and sustainability of the profession. He said competitive salaries remain essential, but teachers also face growing demands as schools adopt digital tools, make classrooms more inclusive and take on more responsibility for student wellbeing, alongside more administrative work.
Isabel Skak Olufsen, an economist at the OECD, said digitalisation had increased demand for ICT professionals, though advances in artificial intelligence may reduce demand for some ICT professionals in the future, particularly for entry-level positions. She said occupations facing the greatest shortages differ across countries because demand depends on countries’ economic structure.
Pia-Johanna Fallström, a spokesperson for the European Labour Authority, said Europe’s labour shortages are increasingly structural rather than temporary, with demographic change, skills mismatches, job quality and limited labour mobility all playing a role. She called for better training, jobs with better working conditions, a better match between workers’ skills and employers’ needs and fair labour mobility.
The OECD found that the unemployment gap between young graduates and the wider working-age population has widened in the countries it analysed, while the European Central Bank found that job prospects for young people in the eurozone have weakened since 2023. In Norway, labourers are the hardest workers to recruit, while food preparation assistants are the hardest to recruit in Spain and elementary workers are the hardest to recruit in France.
Source: Euronews. Read the original report ↗