Wanted: Skilled Workers for a Growing Economy in Brazil

by Luiz Castro | July 2, 2008 at 04:51 am | 80 views | 2 comments

Av. Rio Branco - Rio de Janeiro Main Street

The problem is that Brazil’s educational system is in disarray. In the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s tests of academic performance given every three years to 15-year-olds in 57 nations, Brazilian students finished fourth from the bottom in science and third from the bottom in math.

The average Brazilian worker has six years of schooling, compared with 10 years in South Korea, 11 in Japan and 12 in the United States and Europe, according to the National Confederation of Industry study.(NYT)

For almost any nation other than China or India, achieving more than 5 percent growth a year is hard. Doing it without skilled labor is even harder.

But that is the challenge facing Brazil, the B in the BRIC economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — today’s version of economic tigers.

After years of boom and bust, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is projecting a period of sustained growth, with the gross domestic product increasing 5 percent a year, from now to 2010, and about 3 and 4 percent annually for the decade after.

But many companies and economists, including some inside the government, say the dearth of highly skilled labor, particularly engineers and tradesmen, will jeopardize those goals, and Brazil’s economic and political rise.

“The lack of availability of technical ability may be a constraint on growth, no doubt about it,” José Sergio Gabrielli, president of Petrobras, the state-run oil company, said in an interview. “It is a big challenge for the country.”

The engineering shortage here is spreading across industries. The lack of civil and construction engineers threatens infrastructure projects; areas like banking, aircraft manufacture, petrochemicals and metals are all competing for the same top graduates. In the booming oil and gas industries, companies are turning to foreign labor because there are not enough qualified Brazilians to go around.

“Some of our big clients in the oil and gas sector have 40 to 50 job openings and they can’t fill them,” said Paulo Pontes, managing director of Michael Page International, a leading headhunting firm.