National Employment Centre currently has 8,700 clients registered who are unemployed

The National Employment Centre currently has 8,700 clients registered who are unemployed.

Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations, Jone Usamate says that since its inception in 2010 there was an initial 57,000 clients who were registered under the National Employment Centre adding that the focus now is to work on assisting the 8,700 group of people to find employment.

Usamate also highlighted that since 2015 the National Employment Centre has a total of 1,273 workers under the Seasonal Workers Programme with 490 employed in Australia and 783 in New Zealand.

He says the Centre has engaged 10 employers in Australia and 23 employers in New Zealand with more expected to join the program.

Usamate says the Centre has also had challenges with their database and that was keeping up to date the details of the number of people who are seeking employment.

He says that there was also the problem of identifying the clients who have found permanent employment and these are people who have registered as unemployed and when they became employed they did not inform the centre.

The Employment Minister says that the cleaning of the database was done over a number of months, where clients were called or brought in to update their details and to see if whether they were still unemployed or had found employment.