​This pandemic has put a pause on many things including the global job market.

In a report by the International Labour Organization, warned that unemployment is set to “remain above pre-COVID-19 levels until at least 2023 due to uncertainty about the pandemic's course and duration”.

The organization has estimated that there will be about 52 million fewer jobs when compared pre-pandemic.

This trend is set to continue well into 2023 where it is projected that there will be 27 million fewer jobs leaving a big challenge for economies around the world to generate jobs.

The ILO has said that the recovery will be “slow and uncertain” with one of the factors being the long-lasting pandemic and the multiple variants that keep popping up, notably the Omicron which is becoming the dominant strain around the world.

They added that the global labour market outlook has significantly deteriorated ever since their last projection and a comeback to pre-pandemic performance levels will probably be a slippery slope.

The recovery speed as of now is not equally distributed as well European and North American regions are recovering much faster than the Southeast Asia and South America areas where there are “higher levels of inequality, more divergent working conditions and weaker social protection systems even before the pandemic”.

Overall in 2022, it is estimated that 207 million people will be unemployed globally but this estimation might not encompass the full employment impact of the crisis as many have left their jobs and have yet to return.

A high number of those who have left the workforce are women who have left their jobs to take on extra caregiving roles at home as the pandemic effectively shut down schools.

The ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder says that women are not coming back into the workforce at the same rate as men and this produces concerns that there will be a “‘Long COVID' effect on gender at work”.

Although the report predicts that the impact on women’s employment will shrink in the coming years, they believe that a “sizeable gap" will still be there.