Two documents published over the past fortnight suggest that the question is bigger than one vacancy.
EY’s Malta Attractiveness Survey 2026 reports that 69% of foreign investors cannot recruit the specialised skills they need from Malta’s labour market. Skills shortages remain the most frequently identified risk to Malta’s attractiveness for foreign investment, cited by 63% of respondents.
The Government’s Draft Budgetary Plan for 2027 projects full-time-equivalent employment growth of 4.2% in 2026 and 3.9% in 2027. Over the same two years, labour productivity is projected to fall by 0.1% each year.
More people, with slightly less output per person.
That is what a headcount-led economy looks like in the projection. Employment continues to expand, while the value created by each additional unit of labour does not.
The issue is not whether Malta needs people. It does. The question is whether growth is giving enough people the opportunity to develop, contribute at a higher level and move into the specialist roles the economy says it cannot fill.
What the vacancies are telling us
The snapshot found that:
- 86%did not advertise a degree requirement.
- 29%requested any digital skill.
- 2.4%explicitly mentioned artificial intelligence.
- 16%advertised training or progression.
These are advertised requirements and opportunities. They are not a complete account of everything employers practise or provide. An advert that does not mention training does not prove that no training exists. But job advertising is one of the clearest public signals employers send about the roles they are creating and the pathways they are prepared to offer.
The picture is therefore mixed. Many vacancies appear accessible to people without a degree. That can be positive. Yet comparatively few adverts explain how someone entering the role can learn, develop or move forward.
The market may be relatively open at the point of entry, while remaining much less clear about the route upwards.
From vacancy filling to pathway building
This is where skilling, upskilling and readiness become part of the productivity discussion.
Through Skill Fit, we compare the essential skill profile of one occupation with the essential skills required by another. The comparison is directional: it asks how much of a target role’s essential skill set is already present in the starting role.
A marine engineering technician, for example, shares 15 of the 19 essential skills in the aircraft engineering technician profile. That produces a Skill Fit of 79%. The remaining gap may still include licences, regulated requirements or specialist experience, but the skills starting point is substantial.
A shop salesperson shares one of the 11 essential skills in the shop-supervisor profile, producing a Skill Fit of 9%. In that case, the gap sits at the first visible step of progression.
Some gaps require formal qualifications or licences. Others require a deliberate pathway: clearer responsibilities, guided experience, structured learning and the opportunity to practise new skills at work.
Training is not the same as capability
There is another important tension in the evidence.
Eurostat reports that 21.6% of Maltese enterprises with ten or more employees used at least one AI technology in 2025. Yet only 2.4% of the Observatory’s October vacancy snapshot explicitly named AI.
The two measures have different populations and should not be treated as a direct like-for-like comparison. One records enterprise use; the other records what employers write in job adverts. The gap nevertheless gives us a useful question: are changing technologies being translated clearly enough into roles, skill requirements and development pathways?
The same care is needed when we consider training. EU-OSHA’s ESENER 2024 establishment survey found that 75% of Maltese establishments offered training in the routine use of digital technologies, compared with 42% across the EU. A separate EU-OSHA worker survey found that 35% of workers in Malta said digital technologies reduced their opportunities to use their knowledge and skills, compared with 19% across the EU.
Training is happening. Turning it into capability, judgement and better-designed work is the harder part.
What should change
Malta’s National Skills Strategy 2026–2035 places skills intelligence, employer investment, lifelong learning and better use of Malta’s talent among its priorities. Budget 2027 provides an immediate opportunity to connect those priorities with the way organisations invest, introduce technology and develop people.
My hope is simple: let us judge progress by whether the market for our roles changes.
That would mean more adverts offering a credible path upwards. It would mean more roles naming the digital and AI capabilities the economy says it needs. It would mean treating technology investment and human capability as one organisational decision, rather than two separate initiatives. And it would mean growing more people from within before concluding that the required talent can only be found elsewhere.
Before the next recruitment drive, ask what the market is telling you about the role.
Then ask what it would take to grow the person already doing it.
Jesmond Saliba
Founder, ThinkPeople Nexus
Methodology and sources
Malta Skills Observatory ten-source snapshot
The findings are drawn from a bounded, cross-sectional reading of public job advertising during the first week of October 2026. The Malta Skills Observatory brought together 5,030 retained job-advert records from ten publicly accessible sources serving Malta and Gozo.
This is a snapshot of advertised demand. It is not a census of every vacancy, employer or recruitment channel in Malta.
A “unique advert” means one record retained after applying the evidence cut’s consolidation and deduplication rules. It does not necessarily mean one vacancy or one eventual hire. One advert may cover several positions, while the same underlying vacancy may remain visible on more than one platform where the available identifiers or employer details do not permit a confident match.
Each retained record should remain traceable to its source, public identifier or URL, and capture date.
Interpreting the headline percentages
The published percentages describe what employers explicitly stated in their advertisements.
An advert was counted as requesting a degree, digital skill or artificial-intelligence capability only where that requirement was visible in the captured text. Training and progression were counted only where an advert expressly referred to learning, development, advancement or a comparable opportunity.
Consequently, “no degree requested” means that no degree requirement was advertised. “No AI mentioned” means that no explicit AI requirement was found. “No training or progression mentioned” means that the opportunity was not stated in the advert.
These results do not establish that an employer does not value, use or provide something that was not advertised.
Unless otherwise stated, percentages are calculated against the retained set of 5,030 adverts. They should not be interpreted as measures of employers’ complete practices, workers’ existing capabilities, filled-job outcomes or changes over time. Source coverage varies, and the snapshot has not been statistically weighted to represent the whole Maltese labour market.
Basis of Skill Fit
Skill Fit is a directional comparison between two occupational skill profiles.
Organisation job titles are mapped to occupations in the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework, ESCO. Where a direct occupation match is unavailable, a documented ISCO-based occupational core may be used. The current profiles draw on ESCO version 1.2 and ISCO-08 classifications retrieved through ESCO.
Skill Fit from Role A to Role B = essential skills shared by both roles ÷ essential skills required by target Role B × 100
Only exact matches between essential ESCO skill or knowledge concepts are counted in this published measure. Optional skills are excluded from the denominator. Related but non-identical skills do not receive partial credit.
The marine engineering technician comparison shares 15 of the target aircraft engineering technician profile’s 19 essential skills. This produces 78.9%, presented as 79%.
The shop salesperson comparison shares one of the shop-supervisor profile’s 11 essential skills. This produces 9.1%, presented as 9%.
The calculation is directional. Reversing a comparison may produce a different percentage because the target role, and therefore the denominator, changes.
Skill Fit indicates occupational-profile overlap. It does not establish that a particular person is ready, qualified or suitable for a role. It does not independently assess proficiency, experience, licences, regulatory requirements, performance, motivation or organisational context.
It should therefore be used as a starting point for identifying possible pathways, examining gaps and designing development. It is not, on its own, a basis for recruitment, promotion or pay decisions.
Public sources
- EY, Malta Attractiveness Survey 2026, published 22 October 2026.
- Government of Malta, Draft Budgetary Plan 2027, October 2026, especially Table 2.1.
- Eurostat, The use of artificial intelligence technologies in the European Union, 2026 edition, Table 1.
- EU-OSHA, ESENER 2024 First Findings.
- EU-OSHA, Malta OSH Pulse 2025.
- National Skills Council, National Skills Strategy 2026–2035.
- European Commission, ESCO classification.