Photo from UNIAN
Over half of them found a job before they were granted unemployed status.
Acting Head of the State Employment Service of Ukraine Valeriy Yaroshenko says his agency found a job for 826,000 job seekers in 2018, which was 6% up against 2017.
According to the official, 51% of them found a job before they were granted unemployed status.
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"As of January 28, [2019], some 340,000 Ukrainians had been registered with the State Employment Service. This is 45,000 fewer than as of the same date last year. In general, about 2 million citizens applied to employment centers across Ukraine in 2018. I'd like to stress that 826,000 of them were employed," he said at a press conference on January 29.
In addition, the employment agency in 2018 managed to increase the number of vacancies in its database by 10% to 1.1 million job openings. The number of employers who last year cooperated with the country's employment centers also grew by 10%, to 200,000 entities.
Yaroshenko added that his agency's structure was optimized last year. Majority of administrative and business functions were transferred from the central office to the regional branches, which increased the number of workers providing social services. They accounted for 75% of the total number of staff (against 59% in 2017).
The official says the agency in 2019 plans to improve its centers and services, as well as develop a number of projects that would encourage Ukrainian labor migrants to return home.
According to Yaroshenko, from January 1, 2019, the minimum unemployment benefit for entitled persons depending on the length of service and salary will increase from UAH 1,440 (US$52) to UAH 1,630 ($59), while benefits for other groups of persons will grow from UAH 544 ($12) to UAH 610 ($22).
As UNIAN reported earlier, the number of vacancies in the service's database, over the past two years, increased fivefold. Today, people with higher education account for 90% of the job seekers registered with the Service in large cities.