<div> Czech construction is facing a catastrophic labor shortage </div>

Brno - Czech construction faces a catastrophic shortage of workforce. This is due to a fifteen-year underestimation of vocational education. At the construction fair in Brno today, Pavel Benda, director of the Education Institute of the Association of Entrepreneurs in Construction of the Czech Republic, said this.
    In domestic construction companies with 20 or more employees, officially more than 152,000 people worked this January. However, according to today's words of the president of the Association of Entrepreneurs in Construction, Václav Matyáš, a total of 450,000 people earn their living in the entire construction sector, including employees of very small businesses. Matyáš does not dare to estimate how many of them are foreigners. However, according to him, many qualified craftsmen from Slovakia are coming to work in the Czech Republic.
    According to Benda, vocational education is not supported because there are higher education costs for technical subjects compared to other fields, and also because it has poor government promotion. In the Czech Republic, he says, qualified craftsmen in construction are being replaced by unskilled workers from abroad. Benda also warns that there may not be anyone to teach construction subjects in the future. All these aspects, in his opinion, negatively impact the labor market. He believes that there is a poor connection between education and labor market requirements in the Czech Republic. Benda also claims that there is a lack of an overall strategy for economic direction from which future needed professions could be derived.
    Another problem, according to him, is lifelong education, which has not been addressed for 15 years. According to him, in Germany or Austria, it is possible to obtain state-recognized qualifications after ten years of practice in the field, which are at the level of school education. For example, when a graduated economist spends ten years programming, after those ten years, he is a state-recognized programmer as if he had graduated from a university in this field. In the Czech Republic, if someone wants to change their qualification, according to Benda, they can only go back to school or attend not very successful retraining courses.
    Last year, according to Benda, there was a positive turnaround when a law on the verification and recognition of further education results was adopted, creating conditions for the recognition of qualifications in the labor market through certification. However, he points out that the National Qualification Framework project is financed by the EU, and not systematically and long-term from the state budget. According to Benda, there is also the novelty that employers can intervene in the education process of their future employees through so-called sector councils. They can thus set their requirements for school graduates.
    According to Petr Štěpánek from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Brno University of Technology (VUT), who also lectured at the construction fair today, comprehensive interdisciplinary study programs are lacking at construction faculties of universities, which would educate interdisciplinary construction specialists. However, he believes that companies have the opportunity to significantly influence the content of what construction faculties include in their study programs.