The shortage of skilled workers and engineers is the biggest obstacle to the business activities of design and construction enterprises, a market survey of the National Federation of Hungarian Building Contractors (ÉVOSZ) finds. While the number of people employed in the construction industry is growing each year, the number of vacancies is dropping rapidly, indicating that the labour supply is unable to keep pace with the development of the industry. The federation has therefore initiated a programme to call industry professionals working abroad home.
During the protracted crisis years of the construction industry between 2008 and 2014, some 35,000 skilled construction workers and engineers took jobs in Western Europe. As Hungarian businesses were unable to give them work, this situation swept an unprecedented magnitude of skilled workers abroad to work as individual entrepreneurs, the ÉVOSZ said in a statement.
After 2017, the opportunities of Hungary's construction industry have changed substantially as the volume of orders and completions has been growing more than 20% annually since then.
"Making use of market challenges and opportunities, a significant part of construction businesses have started technology upgrade and organisational development projects, raised wages substantially and started showing appreciation in non-financial benefits as well. The employment situation that has evolved is offering an alternative to working abroad," ÉVOSZ chairman László Koji said.
As a result of the above, the number of vacancies in construction has been dropping steeply since 2018, presenting a new kind of problem to the local construction industry. In an effort to alleviate the increasing labour shortage, the ÉVOSZ is announcing its second Come Home Programme after 2019, attempting to entice construction workers who have migrated west to return to Hungary.
This year, everything has been about the rising price of raw materials, and many have forgotten how the labour shortage and the resulting higher wages were behind rising costs before that. As the latest reports indicate the price of construction materials is now falling, the industry will be able to turn its attention back to the burning issue of labour shortage.
