Annual Report 2024/25 - Monitoring Progress

Although there is no new data for the indicator businesses struggling to recruit labour, feedback from businesses, industry, and public agencies highlights ongoing recruitment and retention difficulties, especially in health, social care, construction, engineering, hospitality, processing, tourism, and transportation. The March 2025 Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) business panel survey found that 47% of employers in the region face a skills gap. The main barriers are short supply of required skills, business location, and lack of accommodation. Locally, Promote Shetland is working to attract people to hard-to-fill professions like teaching, social care, dentistry, medicine, and planning.

Under-Employment

There has been no update on under-employment since 2020. These figures are now unavailable due to lower sampling sizes over the past few years.

The number of employees in Shetland increased to 13,600 from the previous year’s 13,400. This is lower than 14,200 in 2021 and the 2021 target of 13,700. It is difficult to know the reasons for the overall decrease, but, it is possible that the number of employees could be stabilising following the impacts of COVID-19 and large-scale construction projects in Shetland. This indicator is impacted by small sample sizes, and figures are rounded to the nearest hundred. While those are the figures for 2023, the NOMIS Labour Market Profile for Shetland shows that 85.9% of the working age population (16-64) were economically active between January 2024 and December 2024.