The civil service is falling short of recruitment targets amid an aging population and fierce competition from the private sector in technical fields, Minister of Examination Lio Mon-chi (劉孟奇) said in an interview published yesterday.
The number of people who took last year’s senior-rank civil service examination was 6 percent lower than the recruitment goal of 5,600 applicants, Lio said in an interview with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper).
Civil, mechanical and electrical engineering accounted for 90 percent of the recruitment shortfall, he said.
Photo: Huang Yun-hsuan, Taipei Times
The shortfall affected the Railway Bureau and state-owned Taiwan Railway Corp the most, he added.
The government’s staffing woes stem mainly from retention, not recruitment, as the number of applicants with critical qualifications has generally increased, Lio said.
The government recruited 290 civil engineers to fill the same number of vacancies in 2022, 332 to fill 467 vacancies in 2023 and 502 to fill 675 vacancies last year, he said.
That meant recruitment goals were met in 2022, but fell short by 135 and 173 in the following two years respectively, he added.
The government also reported a shortage of veterinarians, who work with horses and cows at a lower pay than their private-sector counterparts treating cats and dogs, Lio said.
The public sector has no shortage of workers in administrative or human resource-type jobs, he said.
Examination Yuan President Chou Hung-hsien (周弘憲) and Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) are working on boosting the recruitment and retention of government workers, Lio said.
Government agencies have been directed to incentivize the workforce by improving work-life balance, streamlining the civil service’s training-to-employment pipeline and removing unnecessarily difficult subjects from certification tests, he said.
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