Administrative duties top a list of young applicants' 12 most sought-after jobs, while tourism and hospitality work is least popular, says the Employers' Confederation of Thai Trade and Industry (EconThai).
The findings were based on around 2 million job seekers who submitted their applications through job placement agency JobThai.com in July this year.
"Most job applicants [around 75%] hold a bachelor's degree or higher," said Tanit Sorat, vice-chairman of EconThai, adding that they were aged between 20 and 30 years old.
A total of 29.7% of candidates applied for administrative work in companies. In second place was factory work (16%), followed by accounting (10.1%).
Other jobs, arranged in order of application numbers, are: technicians (10.1%); shipping, import and export (9.85%); engineering (9.59%); retailing (9.31%); human resources (8.33%); customer services and call centres (8.28%); marketing (6.77%); and information technology, electronics and computer software (5.82%).
Hotels, restaurants, spas and tourist guides were at the bottom of the list with only 3.63% of applicants.
Around half of job applicants (50.8%) live in Bangkok and neighbouring provinces, followed by the Eastern Economic Corridor area (15.8%), the Northeast (12.4%), the North (8.31%), the Central Region (7.76%) and the South (4.73%).
EconThai said the Thai labour market needed skilled workers, but there were many unskilled people looking for jobs.
"The latter does not satisfy demand in the labour market. This group of job seekers usually has a high unemployment rate," said Mr Tanit.
At present, there are around 490,000-510,000 newly graduated applicants, according to EconThai.
Mr Tanit said earlier that the Thai labour situation needed time to fully recover even though the government had reopened the country and eased travel regulations to let more foreign tourists visit Thailand, which will boost the tourism industry.
He said the labour market usually depends on economic growth. EconThai does not expect the domestic economy to fully recover in the second half of this year, partly because of an insufficient number of foreign tourists.
Up to 479,893 people lost their jobs when Thailand was first hit by Covid-19 in 2020, causing a wide-ranging impact across businesses, especially tourism and hotels, according to EconThai.
The confederation's latest survey in June found that of 300 companies interviewed, only 47.4% were able to avoid reducing their staff numbers after the economy turned sluggish due to the spread of Covid-19.
Its survey found 36.8% of companies needed to lay off their workers as they struggled to keep their businesses alive.
Only 15.8% said they hired new employees.
