Author: Tatyana Gracheva

Processing industry offers a quarter of jobs on Ukrainian labor market

The study of the labor market for 2024-2025 by the State Employment Service (SES) reports 116,000 job offers on the Ukrainian labor market with 22% of them in processing industry enterprises.

Other sectors offering a significant share of vacancies are healthcare (13.6%), transport and warehouse management (9.4%), water supply and sewage (7.6%), electricity, gas and steam supply (6.3%) and education (slightly more than 5%).

Opposingly, the share of open vacancies in the service sectors, hotel and restaurant business, real estate and IT is less than 1%.

Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions form the greatest demand for workers (13.0% and 11.5%).

Notably, enterprises in the water supply, public administration and healthcare sectors offered the largest share of open vacancies at the time of the survey (over 40%). In contrast, enterprises in the information, real estate, trade, and hotel and restaurant sectors offered the smallest share of open vacancies.

Mykolaiv (34.2%), Rivne (34.1%) and Volyn (34.1%) regions have the largest shares of enterprises with open vacancies.

Simultaneously, Kyiv (10.4%), Zaporizhia (16.9%), Vinnytsia (18.9%) and Odesa (19.9%) regions have the smallest shares of enterprises with open vacancies. This fact is due to a traditionally high concentration of qualified personnel in the capital, which reduces the need for open vacancies. Particularly, remote work at many enterprises has reduced the need for active recruitment. As researchers say, vacancies were rapidly filled because of high competition in the labor market.

As for problems creating the lack of the workforce, it is possible to cite the emigration of the working-age population and the lack of significant investments in development.

Despite the opportunities of the trade and transport sectors to fill vacancies more quickly, economic activity is gradually declining in Vinnytsia and Odessa regions.

From the point of the employment structure, the age group of 25-60 years had the main share of employees in 2024 (80.5%). Only 6.4% of workers were youth under 25 years old. The water supply, education and medicine sectors had the largest number of older employees.

In general, the survey results showed a 1.1% decrease in the number of employees during 2024.

Almost 55,000 employers were surveyed by the State Employment Service during the employer survey that lasted from December 17, 2024 to January 31, 2025. They selected economically active enterprises with an average number of employees of ten or more people without relation to the defense complex.

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Kazakhstan’s sectoral gaps persist despite young workforce growth

Kazakhstan’s youth labor market is a crutial issue for the country’s ongoing economic transformation. Analysts from Finprom.kz report approximately 1.8 million young people aged 15 to 28 employed across the country in 2024 (0.6% increase compared to the previous year).
Almaty has the highest concentration of young workers (243,200 employed young people, 5% up from 2023). Turkestan region follows it. Opposingly, the lowest rate of youth employment is in the Ulytau, North Kazakhstan, and Zhetysu regions.
77.7% of the total number of employed youth (1.4 million) are salaried employees. Also, there are 331,900 young individual entrepreneurs, 58,300 self-employed workers, 2,700 founders or participants in economic partnerships, joint-stock companies, or cooperatives, and 2,400 engaged in private practice.
The number of professionals among employed young people is 424,400 (a 1.3% decrease from the previous year). Then follow service and sales workers (291,700), unskilled laborers (281,700), technical and support staff (195,100), and industrial, construction, and transport workers (142,600).
In industry sectors, youth primarily work in wholesale and retail trade, automotive repair, education, and agriculture, including forestry and fishing. Utilities (water and electricity supply) and real estate have the lowest rate of youth employment.
The number of unemployed individuals aged 15 to 28 decreased to 62,000 (by 6.7% from 2023) in 2024, with the unemployment rate at 3.7% among 16 to 24-year-olds and 3% among those aged 25 to 28 (the overall unemployment rate for the working-age population in Kazakhstan is 4.7%).
The highest number of unemployed youth (11,100) is in Almaty, then comes Astana (7,800) and the Almaty region (7,700). The lowest youth unemployment figures were reported in Ulytau, Pavlodar, and North Kazakhstan regions.
According to the report, 18,200 young people spent from one to three months on job hunting in 2024, 16,200 from three to six months, 16,000 less than a month, 7,500 looked for an employment for more than six months, and 4,000 had been looking for work for over a year.
Totally, there were 448,200 unemployed Kazakhstani citizens in the fourth quarter of 2024, with the unemployment rate at 4.2% among men (211,100) and 5.1% among women (237,100). 35 to 54 (256,900 people) and 55 to 64 (69,700) were the most affected age groups.
Family responsibilities (61,400), layoffs or company closures (50,300), and difficulty finding suitable jobs (112,500) were the most frequent reasons of unemployment. Domestic duties (44,200), health issues (17,500), and challenges securing employment post-graduation (16,600) were other contributing factors.
It is important to develop flexible employment policies suitable for the evolving labor market and to enhance conditions for self-employment and youth entrepreneurship to reduce youth unemployment in the long term.

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