In 2023, about 15 thousand people employed online in Albania

2024-06-10 07:35:40, Aktualitet CNA

In 2023, about 15 thousand people employed online in Albania

Illustrative photo, taken from Google

Young Albanians are increasingly looking at online employment platforms as suitable.

According to data from the Gigmetar Regional Data Portal, in Albania, during the last year, about 15 thousand people were employed in online platforms.

North Macedonia and Albania have the highest number of online employees in relation to the population than 9 other countries in the region.

However, online employees account for only 1.1% of total employment reported in 2023 for ages 15 and over by INSTAT.

Nearly 58% of online employees in the region are freelancers registered with Up-work, the dominant remote work platform in the Region.

Earnings from online work grew by 3.2% on average in 2023 compared to 2022, but the biggest gains went to countries with higher average wages, further widening the wage gap across the region.

Upwork, Freelancer and Guru were the main remote employment platforms in 9 countries of the Balkans where 114,111 freelancers are employed by 2023, of which about 15 thousand were in Albania.

After the peak that online employment marked during and after the pandemic, in 2023 in most countries of the region it decreased across all platforms and countries.

The lowest contraction was in Albania (by 11%) and the highest in Romania, where about 40% of translators left their jobs online.

Labor supply has shrunk by a significant average of 52.5% on Freelancer, while Upwork recorded a smaller decline of 10.4% regionally.

Guru was the only platform to see growth, albeit by a modest 1.2%.

The latest measurement found some variation in how online workers were distributed by occupation, with two trends identified.

First, there has been a fairly large increase in the percentage of software and technology development (to 3.2pp); Professional services was the only other occupation that saw a slight increase, while all others shrank.

The decline was similar in three areas, "data sorting", "creativity and multimedia", and "marketing (by an average of 0.6 points"), while "writing and translation" recorded a more pronounced decrease at 1.8% points.

In 2024, two features stood out in the online job market in the region. First, the contraction of the labor market and modest income growth.

Gigmetar analysts point out that these changes have occurred as a result of business uncertainty from numerous global challenges, such as the impact of artificial intelligence, restrictive economic policies, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate and economic changes. crisis./ Monitor.al