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  • Tackling the skills mismatch

    People’s skills are a major asset – both for individuals themselves and for society at large. They help people find rewarding jobs and are a major ingredient in boosting productivity, competitiveness and innovation. But when peoples’ skills do not fit demand out there in the labour market, this is when the trouble starts.

  • This phenomenon, known in the trade as the skills mismatch, is the hidden factor behind one of the biggest paradoxes afflicting labour markets everywhere to a greater or lesser degree. It goes a long way towards explaining how it can be that

  • while many people cannot find jobs, at the same time employers struggle to find employees with the skills they need. For young people in many partner countries, especially women, it makes finding that all important first job hard or sometimes impossible.

    Finding ways of solving this contradiction is at the heart of the ETF’s work and is also the reasoning behind a new project launched in 2011 called ‘anticipating and matching demand and supply of skills in ETF partner countries’.

    Why is matching so important for partner countries?

    The economies of ETF partner countries are often heavily dependent on the flow of foreign direct investment and imported technology and may be characterised by a divide between an emerging, modern sector and a less innovative, more traditional sector, often highly informal. Businesses tend to be small and micro-enterprises may find it hard to articulate their requirements for skills.

    In many countries, the population is predominantly young causing a strong demand for new jobs as each cohort enters the labour market. This demand may find an escape valve through brain drain and outward migration when the local economy cannot provide enough jobs. In countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, the explosive combination of high youth unemployment and political and social discontent has made the need for better functioning labour markets only too plain.

  • Labour markets in the future

  • Tackling the skills mismatch means not only looking at the situation today but attempting to predict what labour markets will look like in the future. And seeing as crystal balls have shown their limitations, a more methodical approach is called for.

    “The first step is to assess current demand for skills and to anticipate future skills needs, the second step is to turn this information into effective action; to make

    “Tackling the skills mismatch means not only looking at the situation today but attempting to predict what labour markets will look like in the future”

  • education and training curricula more demand orientated and to guide young people in their decisions about what to learn and where to find a good job,” says Lizzi Feiler, team leader of the project and a labour market specialist at the ETF.

  • The project, due to run until 2013, aims to help policy makers and practitioners in partner countries improve their matching systems. So far a network of experts from Croatia, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine has been set up and each participating country has taken stock of what it currently does to tackle the mismatch. The results of this exercise will be presented in a synthesis report before the end of the year.

    In 2012, this team together with the ETF, will work on developing more effective tools for anticipating skills needs and matching these to demand for labour. “The ETF will put a strong emphasis on how the findings can be

  • used to achieve better labour market results,” says Feiler. It will also draw upon the wealth of experience and research available in EU Member States and other OECD countries as well as initiatives in partner countries such as employer surveys, labour market transition studies or sector specific skills analysis.

  • Words: Rebecca Warden, ICE

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