The Timorese economy is booming, even if the rest of the world is not. The International
Monetary Fund (IMF) has recorded for Timor-Leste a growth rate of 10.5 per cent in 2008
(admittedly from a low base) and predicts a 7.8 per cent growth rate in 2009. According the
Prime Minister’s budget speech, funding has been allocated in 2009 for the development of
ports, airports, roads, schools and health centres, creating an estimated 26,000 jobs from these
construction and related activities.
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Skills deficit holding back Timorese enterprises
However, many Timorese enterprises fear they are missing out. For enterprises in the key
growth sectors of construction, hospitality and tourism, lack of skilled workers is a major
barrier to participating in this growth. Moreover, these enterprises are seeking not merely
workers with the right technical skills. Just as important to enterprises is finding workers with
good work discipline and the capacity to work in a flexible way.
All enterprises nation-wide engaged in construction, hospitality and tourist activities were
surveyed in late October/November 2008. These enterprises employ some 9,200 permanent
and temporary employees, which is about one in five of Timor-Leste’s non-agricultural private
sector labour force.
Key findings
How well are enterprises served by domestic skills training providers? Only just over one-inthree
of the permanent workforce of construction enterprises and one-in-five of the permanent
workforce of hotels, restaurants, cafes and tourist facilities had recruited workers from local
training institutions. The other important source of skills is from overseas: one in ten of the
permanent workforce of the construction enterprises were foreign workers as were just over
one in twenty (20) permanent workers in the hospitality sector. The occupations they fill are
engineers, cooks, skilled workers in construction and on-the-job trainers.
Employers were given a list of 77 skills and asked to rate each one in terms of its importance to
their enterprise and their difficulty in finding people with this skill. These two factors, when
multiplied together, provide a listing of priority skills for these two sectors. The listing broadly
follows what would be expected - the high-level technical skills of engineer, architect and
draftsperson are at the top and skills which are not important to the enterprise and easy-to-find
such as security guards, interpreters for Bahasa Indonesia and drivers in the hospitality sector
are at the bottom. What the priority ranking of skills reveals is high rating of
administrative/office skills. Also ranked high for construction enterprises is a range of middlelevel
or intermediate skills of Machine Operator, Mechanic, Air-conditioning Installer,
Electrician, Tiler, Welder and Roofer.
This ranking of skills provides an overview of enterprise skills needs and is a valuable
reference point for assessing existing skills training provision. It is not intended as a means of
providing information about the specific demand for skills of particular enterprises. In
construction in particular, information about the number of people required with particular
skill-sets depends on the amount and type of work an enterprise is currently undertaking which
means information about numbers of skills vacancies has to be tied to a specific place and time
period.Key role of enterprises in training and skills transfer
A significant finding of the survey is the important role that many enterprises play in skills
training and skills transfer. Over one-in-three enterprises in these sectors provided training for
their workers in 2008, most of it on-the-job. Three-in-ten enterprises knew what training they
would provide in 2009 with a further one-in-four enterprises stating that they were unsure.
These findings suggest that many enterprises are key sources of skills training or are
potentially so with further encouragement from government.
Providing work placements is a fundamental way that enterprises participate in skills
formation. Disappointingly, only one in six enterprises did so. The work placements provided
were only of a short duration, with half of the placements being of four weeks or less, which is
too short to have an impact.
Encouragingly, most employers support the Government’s new arrangements to lift the quality
of skills training. In response to a series of questions to gauge interest in the new training
arrangements, over 8 out of 10 enterprises expressed strong interest in learning more and,
indeed, in actively participating in ways to increase the quality of training.
Major conclusions
The survey results offer clear evidence that the vast majority of employers in two key sectors
are willing to provide information about their skills needs. Timorese enterprises need not be
viewed by government policy makers as ‘black boxes’ or big unknowns. Backed by the
substantial work already done by the Peace Dividend Trust in identifying all enterprises, the
survey demonstrates that it is possible for government, with modest resources, to seek
information directly from enterprises about their skill and other needs.
The core of the survey - the priority skills profile - can be used to seek employer ratings in
other sectors of the economy to develop a national priority skills profile. Employers found it
easy to rate skills in terms of importance to the enterprise and difficulty of finding people with
the skill. Other useful information can also be collected about the training effort of enterprises
in other sectors, their willingness to provide work placements and openness to participate in
the Government’s new training arrangements.