The International Monetary Fund has reported that Guyana's unemployment rate fell to 6.2 per cent by the end of 2025. The decline reflects the pace of the country's economic growth, which has pushed demand for workers across several sectors well beyond historical norms.

Guyana's economy has expanded at a rate few countries have matched in recent decades. Real gross domestic product grew by an average of nearly 40 per cent between 2023 and 2024, and by a further 19 per cent in 2025. Oil production remains the largest contributor to this growth, but the IMF has noted that expansion has extended well beyond the energy sector. Construction, agriculture, manufacturing and mining together drove non-oil GDP growth of around 14 per cent last year. Forecasts suggest the non-oil economy will grow by roughly 7 per cent annually over the next five years, supported by government infrastructure spending. Inflation edged up slightly in early 2026 amid global supply chain pressures, though it held at 3.3 per cent through most of 2025.

This growth has created a labour market problem of a different kind. Officials, including the Senior Minister with Responsibility for Finance, have acknowledged that businesses are creating jobs faster than the domestic education and training system can produce qualified workers to fill them. Government estimates put the number of new jobs added to the economy over the five years to 2025 at roughly 104,000. That figure has prompted concern within government that, without a faster expansion of technical training, the shortage of skilled labour could begin to erode the country's competitiveness as investment continues to flow in.

In response, the government has expanded technical and vocational education programmes aimed largely at younger workers. Thousands of young people have gone through apprenticeship schemes that combine technical instruction with basic business training. Separate programmes have introduced coding, robotics and other digital skills to prepare students for roles in the technology and energy industries, sectors expected to account for a growing share of employment as the economy diversifies away from raw resource extraction.

The scale of the challenge is tied closely to Guyana's demographics. The population passed one million by the end of 2025, and around 42 per cent of the country is under the age of 25. That youth population has already seen sharp changes in its own employment prospects. Youth unemployment fell from close to 32 per cent in late 2021 to 12.1 per cent by the end of 2024, a decline that took place over just three years. The share of young people who are neither working nor in education or training also fell substantially over the same period, according to domestic labour statistics.

Most of these young workers have entered retail, construction and public administration, the three sectors currently absorbing the largest share of new labour market entrants. Whether that pattern holds will depend partly on how quickly vocational and digital training programmes can supply workers for the more specialised roles opening up in energy and manufacturing.

The IMF's assessment suggests Guyana's growth is likely to continue at a strong pace in the coming years, even as the rate of expansion moderates from the exceptional levels recorded in 2023 and 2024. For now, the country's labour market challenge is less about generating jobs than about training people quickly enough to take them. How the government manages that gap is likely to shape the next phase of Guyana's economic transformation.

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