Cayman News Agency: $144 million spent over five years to help locals find jobs

(CNS): The Cayman Islands government has spent nearly C$144 million over five years (2019-2023) on efforts to help Caymanians get into jobs, but a report from the Auditor General’s Office has found little evidence that the various programs and attempts to remove barriers have actually impacted unemployment. The report also noted that there are large gaps in the data that show which measures are working and which are not.

In the latest OAG report, Improving employment prospects for CaymaniansAuditor-General Sue Winspear said low education levels, a minimum wage that has failed to keep pace with inflation and childcare issues were major barriers to employment for locals.

“Despite meeting the definition of full employment, there are still many barriers to employment that need to be addressed, including low education levels, minimum wage levels, lack of apprenticeship opportunities and child care access,” Winspear said.

“Most unemployed Caymanians have only a high school degree or less and while there are many jobs that only require this level of education, these jobs are often very low paying. I note that while progress has been made in developing a framework for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), this is not covered in school career guidance. Given that most jobs in the Cayman Islands are likely to require TVET skills, this needs to be given greater focus,” she added.

Among the report’s 10 recommendations, Winspear said WORC should produce forecasts of long-term labour demand and the government should develop a national employment policy.

“The policy needs to take a holistic approach,” she said in a press release about the report. The OAG believes the most important recommendations are the development of a national employment policy, the preparation of long-term labour demand forecasts, and a focus on the WORC employment plan and the Ministry of Education’s TVET framework. Winspear said strategic planning is not enough to truly address unemployment issues on the ground.

The report also found worrying trends that indicate a large gap in the government’s labor policies. Surveys showed few locals were interested in future tech jobs, CIG had no plans to address those challenges, and Winspear found a clear “mismatch” between the types of jobs Caymanians wanted and the types of jobs employers needed.

While almost half of all jobs of the future are IT-related, less than 8% of Caymanians who responded to a WORC survey last year said they were interested in such jobs. In the report, Winspear said jobs in high demand are changing and there is a disconnect between jobs that employers expect to be in high demand and jobs that Caymanians are interested in.

Successive governments have continually stressed the importance of improving employment prospects for Caymanians, but there has been little talk about how this can be achieved, or whether any of the programs, policies and initiatives are actually having an effect.

Winspear said it was unclear how the goals set out by the CIG in its strategic policy statement would be achieved because they did not provide clear definitions or identify the needs they were intended to address. Every SPS over the years has said achieving full employment is a government priority, but without clarifying what that means.

While civil servants are responsible for implementing government policy, there is no overall strategy and neither is WORC. Winspear said there are a number of individual strategies and policies in place, but they need to be improved.

Significant amounts of public money are being invested in addressing unemployment in the local workforce, which, despite growing to unprecedented size, still cannot provide suitable jobs for all Caymanians who are seeking work.

according to ESO dataThe $144 million invested over the past five years has only helped lift Cayman’s unemployment rate from 3.9% in the spring of 2019 to more than 5% for locals at the end of last year. While COVID disrupted jobless numbers during the 2020 lockdown, economic recovery throughout 2022 led to Cayman’s unemployment rate falling to just 3.6% as borders reopened.

In her report, Winspear noted a lack of data to measure how the money spent and actions taken by the government affected the ability of local people to find suitable employment.

CIG “offers many employment programs through WORC and other entities, but the effectiveness of these programs is unclear,” she said. The seven programs offered by WORC and its partners have an average completion rate of 83% over four years. “While completion rates vary for each program, that’s good news. However, when you dig deeper into the statistics, you see that’s not always the case.”

She explained that in 2022, less than half of applicants were accepted into one of the programs, and more than a quarter of applicants dropped out before completing their studies. “Low acceptance rates indicate that there are not enough places to meet demand,” Winspear said. “This is evident in apprenticeship programs across the country, where fewer than one in 10 applicants are accepted due to limited space.”

The Department of Education paid $600,000 to private company Superior Auto between 2019 and 2023 to run a training program for aspiring mechanics. But no purchase agreement was reached with the company.
The company, and therefore the ministry, could not be held accountable, and did not track the outcomes for participants.

“We cannot assess the effectiveness of the program and it is unlikely that the funding received by the Department of Education will be value for money,” Ms Winspear said.

The Immigration Act requires WORC to provide labour market needs assessments to government and the private sector, but no assessments were completed in WORC’s first three years. The agency began producing job posting reports in March 2022, but Winspear said she found it difficult to measure and report on WORC’s performance because of incomplete data.

WORC did not set or monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess its performance from 2019 to 2021. WORC began setting performance indicators in June 2021, but she said WORC still did not regularly measure and monitor performance against these indicators, and many indicators did not have targets.

Therefore, it is impossible to measure their performance, Winspear said, noting that the department still focuses on outputs rather than outcomes.

View the latest performance audit report CNS Library.