On 17 January 2022, the Press Office of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs opened up applications for the first of 11 new programmes to boost skills and employment that will run in 2022.
All initiatives are organised through the OAED (Organismos Apasholisseos Ergatikou Dynamikou), the government employment agency that oversees labour policy and development in Greece, and funded by national instruments, funding allocated to the Greek recovery and resilience plan, as well as additional European financing.
Initiative #1: 4.000 new jobs through business subsidies
This first programme, with a budget of €26 million, targets unemployed people above the age of 30 and especially women, offering an annual subsidy of €6.000 to €8.000+ for businesses in the Greek regions of Western Attica and Piraeus, the South Aegean and the Western sector of Athens. The Greek government expects to see 4.000 people employed for a period of at least 1 year under the programme, which is funded directly by the Greek government and by the European Union through the European Social Fund. Beneficiaries of the programme will receive a monthly salary between around €500 to €700 per month.
Businesses and entreprises can submit grant applications until 17 February at 15:00 Athens time through the state aid information system of the Ministry of Development and Investments.
Once the deadline has passed, OAED employment experts will assess applications and nominate candidates to the company, according to category, specialisation and needed qualifications, including digital skills – leaving for the recruitment decision with the company itself.
More information is available on a dedicated page on the OAED website.
Success stories from previous OAED skills development programmes
In this context, the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Kostis Hatzidakis, and the Governor of the OAED, Spyros Protopsaltis, visited the Greek food industry company ELVIDA FOOD SA, based in Peristeri. The company is export-oriented and employs 14 beneficiaries of previous OAED upskilling programmes.
Mr. Hatzidakis and Mr. Protopsaltis met and spoke with some of the employees who found work in the company through the programmes, who highlighted the positive outcome of their involvement with the OAED and drew on their experience to make recommendations for improving the initiative’s future editions. The company’s management team stated that the OAED has helped to make recruitment easier, especially during the most difficult stages of the pandemic and expressed the intention of keeping the jobseekers recruited under the programme after the subsidy’s end.
The programs of the period 2020-21 were aimed in three directions: driving forward employment, offering an opportunity to beneficiaries to gain valuable work experience, and supporting entrepreneurship. According to the estimates by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs 50.131 new jobs were created thanks to 16 programmes, implemented by the OAED between May 2020 and December 2021. While not solely oriented to the ICT sector, the programmes helped SMEs with different levels of digital maturity and fewer resources to invest in people’s work skills, professional development and speed up their sector’s or company’s digitalisation.
With the new set of programmes starting with the first call in January 2022, Greece remains on track to boosting employment by creating more than 80.000 jobs by the end of 2022.
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