Macau’s gaming industry will face a shortfall of over 7,000 workers in certain positions by 2020 against the backdrop of the current low unemployment rate and the current pool of suitably-skilled local workers, according to a labour-market survey conducted by the city’s authorities. It said the greatest need was likely to be for mid-level managers.
In a statement released on Thursday, a local-government body called the Talents Development Committee said it estimated the city’s gaming industry would need an additional 7,525 employees by 2020. Macau has for several years had statistical full employment, according to official data.
The city needs to maintain a large pool of imported workers to help operate its gaming and hospitality sectors. The Macau government nonetheless maintains controls on the number of non-resident workers that can be freshly imported. The city also has policies designed to boost the training and skill development opportunities for locals, in order to increase their upward mobility in the workforce.
In the fourth quarter of 2018, Macau’s gaming industry had a total of 57,246 full-time employees, an increase of 1.1 percent year-on-year.
The committee’s announcement listed the job positions most in demand since 2018 and that were expected to remain in demand up to the year 2020. It said the list was based on information collected during the third quarter of 2018.
According to the committee’s data, middle-management vacancies would be for: deputy managers; collections supervisors; credit supervisors; assistant security managers; assistant supply chain managers; medical doctors; auditors; information systems analysts; and staff trainers.
Other gaming-sector vacancies were likely to be in: facilities maintenance and repair technicians or casino technicians; card room attendants; senior security officers; security control room operators; casino attendants; and even for chief executive officer-level.
The committee highlighted in Thursday’s release that local gaming industry middle management was already mostly made up of Macau ID holders.
As of 2017, as much as “97.4 percent” of the city’s gaming middle-management staff, or a total of 17,896 individuals, was local ID holders, according to the committee’s survey data. The data also showed that in 2017, the gaming industry had 383 locals that worked in gaming-sector senior-management roles, covering 76.8 percent of such posts.
The Macau government has said it wants to increase the share of locals working in middle- and upper-level management positions in the city’s casino industry to 85 percent by 2020.
