25.01.2018

Norway: There is a significant shortage of workforce within the aquaculture industry today

NTNU and the Guri Kunna aquaculture VET school have collected and gathered information from a representative group of 41 regional mangers that lead 520 staff in the aquaculture industry in Mid-Norway. The purpose was to investigate and document the situation regarding workforce qualifications and skills and their influence on recruitment issues.

This report summarizes the opinion survey results based up on the analysis of data gathered during 5 meetings with 3 large and one medium sized fish farming company. ONE2ACT Eval instant response tool was used to collect the data.
Main findings:

• Managers consider skills like work quality, business orientation, proactivity, collaboration and independence to be more important than learning.
• There is a significant shortage of workforce within the aquaculture industry today. This is a consequence of the fast expansion in the aquaculture industry during the recent years, whereby it has been necessary to recruit many more people to work in the fish-farming sector.
• 53% of the aquaculture industry applies the apprenticeship system as their most important strategy for recruitment of a workforce that has got their aquaculture qualifications.
• There is an overwhelming agreement that both each company and the fish farming industry sector will be influenced by external changes during the next 3 to 5 years. Our data shows that that the managers perceive that the company will be influenced by new technology to a larger extent than the fish farming industry itself.

See full report (PDF, 1.75 MB). To open PDF files you need a PDF reader such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader available at https://get.adobe.com/reader/