From Lace to Code: Inside Malta’s €60 Million Plan to Future-Proof Its Workforce

Skills for the Rock: How Malta is Rewiring its Workforce for the Next Decade
By Hot Malta Correspondent

On a Tuesday evening in Birkirkara, while most cafés are shutting up, the old police station on Triq il-Wied is buzzing. Teenagers in hoodies and pensioners in cardigans share the same long table, heads bent over Arduino boards and 3-D printers. This is Skola2030, one of 14 “micro-campus” labs the government quietly rolled out last year to test a simple but urgent idea: if Malta’s economy is going to pivot from pouring concrete to exporting code, the skills have to be grown here, not imported.

The numbers explain the panic. The European Commission predicts 90 % of future jobs in Malta will demand digital competence, yet only 42 % of adults currently possess anything beyond basic computer literacy. Meanwhile, the grey economy still leans on 22,000 third-country nationals doing everything from plastering to pastry. With the post-COVID construction boom sucking in labour, wages have risen 14 % in two years, but productivity has flat-lined. Translation: we are paying more for the same output because the skills mix hasn’t moved up the value chain.

Enter the National Skills Council, set up in 2022 and chaired by former Vodafone CEO Amrita Sagar. Its €60 million “Skills Deal” signed with Brussels last month is the island’s biggest-ever training endowment, eclipsing even the 1980s tourism master-plan that created the first hotel school in St Julian’s. The council’s first act was refreshingly Maltese: it sent 120 “skill scouts” to village band clubs, parish centres and festa committees to ask what talents people wanted, not what HR managers thought they needed. The answer, scribbled on hundreds of kunserva-stained paper napkins, was a triad: English plus coding, green construction, and care for the elderly.

Culture, not curriculum, is the hidden curriculum. In a country where the village festa is still the biggest crowd-puller, learning has to feel communal. At the Birkirkara lab, 68-year-old Mariella Camilleri is learning Python between sessions of lace-making. “I tatted my daughter’s wedding veil with 2,000 bobbins,” she laughs, holding up a laptop whose wallpaper is a photo of the same veil. “If I can follow that pattern, I can follow code.” Her instructor, 19-year-old Ġorġ Zammit, is a former altar boy who reverse-engineered Minecraft mods instead of doing his catechism homework. The inter-generational swap—lace for logic—feels like a living postcard of Malta’s past courting its future.

The economic stakes are high. The Malta Developers Association warns that 28 % of small building firms could close within five years if they don’t upskill to EU energy-efficiency standards. On the other side of the harbour, SmartCity is desperate for 3,000 more cloud engineers to service the gaming companies that have already outgrown their chilled offices. The Skills Deal bridges the gap by paying 50 % of wages for the first six months of accredited training, but only if employers release staff for one full day a week. Early adopters include HSBC, which is retraining 400 bank tellers as cyber-fraud analysts, and the Corinthia Group, whose chefs are learning to code AI menus that reduce food waste by 18 %.

Yet the biggest impact may be social. In Gozo, where youth unemployment still hovers at 13 %, the Xewkija civic centre has been converted into a renewable-energy academy running on micro-credentials. Trainees install solar tiles on the roof of the adjacent 1960s church, whose priest, Fr Joe Galea, tweets daily meter readings to his flock. “We used to measure collection-plate takings,” he grins. “Now we measure kilowatts donated to the village food bank.” The project has already cut utility bills for 87 low-income households, creating a virtuous circle: lower bills, more disposable income, evening classes in blockchain.

Still, challenges linger. Women account for only 27 % of ICT graduates, and early-school-leaving among boys is rising again. The scouts’ next mission is to take the labs on a roving truck—think ice-cream van with fibre-optic cables—to secondary schools in Żejtun and Rabat, bribing sceptical teens with pastizzi and Fortnite-style hackathons. Government sources say if uptake reaches 15 % of 14-year-olds by 2026, the EU will double the funding.

Back in Birkirkara, Mariella has just debugged her first programme: a lace-pattern generator that exports files to a laser cutter. She plans to sell customised place-mats at next month’s Lapsi fair. “My grandson told me printing is cheaper,” she shrugs, “but cheap isn’t the point. Handmade kept our islands alive for centuries. Now it’s hand-coded.” As the lights dim and the last pastizzi crumbs are swept away, the old station feels less like a classroom and more like Malta’s newest craft shop—one where the thread is fibre-optic and the bobbin is a cursor blinking towards tomorrow.