Lolland Municipality has learned something from the largest construction project in Denmark’s history and Northern Europe’s largest construction site: If you want to recruit qualified labour, you must use foreign recruitment agencies. This is what Lolland’s mayor, Holger Schou Rasmussen (S), says:
Lolland runs out first
– We could already see in 2015-2016 that Lolland Municipality would become one of the municipalities that first ran out of qualified labour in the health and care sector. As the Fehmarn project got underway, we could also see that the foreign consortia were bringing in foreign labour, and we have adopted that idea, says Holger Schou Rasmussen.
On the first of December, you will then be able to see the first concrete result of that effort. The first ten new municipal employees recruited in Spain via international recruitment agencies arrive here. Before leaving for Denmark, they received an intensive online course in Danish. This must be followed up with a stay at a language school immediately after arrival in Lolland.
It is employees for the health and care sector who have already been hard to recruit in the Lolland Municipality. That problem will only get bigger in the future.
International school
Mayor Holger Schou Rasmussen emphasizes that an international recruitment agency can not alone procure enough, for example, southern European labour for vacant Danish positions:
– We have something to offer in the form of an international primary school, so a family with children can see a perspective in moving to Lolland, he says.
Available Danes first
Holger Schou Rasmussen emphasizes, however, that Danish labour is at the front of the queue when municipal jobs are to be filled:
– Of course, we make a big effort in continuing education, and we pick up the local unemployed first, says Holger Schou Rasmussen.
There just aren’t that many of them anymore, as the Fehmarn construction has pretty much taken up the entire labour market in southern Zealand and Lolland-Falster. And that has therefore led Lolland Municipality to take a closer look at how to recruit future employees abroad.
Net migration to Lolland
New figures from Statistics Denmark also show that Lolland Municipality actually experienced net migration in the third quarter of this year. The Institute for Future Research has looked at the figures, and cannot immediately conclude that it is Fehmarn that draws:
– We cannot see at the numbers why people move. But we can see that they do. And normally, the third quarter is when young people move from the province to the bigger cities to start their studies, but this has obviously not been the case for Lolland. So we cannot rule out that they choose to stay to work on the Fehmarn link, says futurist researcher Jesper Bo Jensen from the Institute for Future Research.
