STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE ROMANIAN LABOUR MARKET

Analysis of the effect on the evolution of the labor market predicts a significant increase of demand in skills and qualifications on all levels of workplaces in the future. Industrial and technological changes bring along higher demands of medium-to-highly qualified personnel, while leaving behind the underprepared. Workplaces that required a low level of preparation in the past have also shown a constant increase in medium or even high-level skill requirements. Currently, the level of skill demand is increasing in all professional categories, including even the lowest tiers of occupations. There is a noticeable increase in demand for a highly qualified and adaptive workforce, as well as workplaces requiring high qualifications and formal education. Requirements regarding skills and qualifications also suffer a significant increase in all workplace levels. Structural changes in the labor market lead to a polarizing increase of workplaces dedicated to the highly-qualified, resulting in a drop of demand for workplaces involving trivial tasks, suited for the less qualified personnel. Thus, workplace polarization occurs on all professional levels creating a significant imbalance in favor of the highly-qualified. In this context, less qualified personnel (or non-qualified) will face multiple adversities when searching for a workplace in the future as well as confronting the permanent threat of unemployment (statistics indicating that non-qualified or less qualified personnel have approximatively twice the unemployment rate when comparing them to the highly-qualified category). In the same context, Romania’s economy is also in a constant and dynamic change process, generated both by the transition to a market-based economy and by the effects of globalization. To further understand the labor market mechanisms, this paper analyses a series of statistical indicators obtained either through direct measurement such as: labor resources, active population, working population, number of employees, number of unemployed, either through calculation of derived indicators such as: activity rate, employment rate, unemployment rate, etc.