An Education Needs Assessment of CARIFORUM Firms

drain from outward migration. However, intraregional labour mobility remains limited, with only

five of the ten categories of skilled labour being granted the right to work across all member states

without a work permit, and the application process for these categories remains quite burdensome

with varied compliance across Member States (Al Hassan et al. 2020). In the CARICOM

Commission on the Economy Report, Persaud at al. (2020) suggested major reforms to be made

to the CARICOM skills certificate that would support greater labour mobility, notably (i) that any

CARICOM national possessing more than two Caribbean Secondary Education Certificates or

their equivalent would be treated as a skilled national with rights to stay and work and (ii) no

further specially obtained documentation is required other than electronic verification to grant

labour mobility. Certainly, the OECS is far more integrated, with free labour mobility extending

to both non-skilled and skilled labour (Al Hassan et al. 2020).

Conclusion

This section provides a concise overview of the documented high-level findings related to skills

imbalance across CARIFORUM states. Skills demand is driven by global influences, especially

regarding the future of work where high-tech and complementary soft skills are increasingly

sought. Development trajectories at the regional and national levels dictate the skills demands of

private sector firms operating in these spaces. Demand for ICT, soft, and business skills is evident

across all sectors. Some sector-specific skills demand is documented but mostly for traditional

sectors like agriculture and agro-processing, light manufacturing, creative industries, tourism, non

tourism services, and newer sectors like the green economy. Despite growing skills demand,

systemic constraints rooted in the mismatch between training programmes and private sector skills

needs, unfavourable labour market demographics and limited intraregional labour mobility limit

the region’s human resource capacity in supplying t he requested market demand.

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