By Fabio Boscherini, EUROsociAL+ expert in employment policies
The long period of unemployment due to the anti-COVID-19 lock-down in Europe also had implications in relation to the organisation and modalities of provision of employment services, both for individuals and companies.
In this context, the readjustment and reorganisation processes experienced by some European employment services [1] due to the closure of front-office activities during the lock-down period may represent possible paths to continue and deepen not only in the post-lock-down reopening stage, but also in the future operation of these services.
In this sense, some possible paths can be identified in the organisational evolution of employment services:
- The strengthening of non-face-to-face remote modes of communication and service for users (individuals and companies), with specific emphasis on digital ones;
- The continuation and optimisation of strict health protection measures for employment offices regarding face-to-face service modalities post lock-down.
- The strengthening and deepening of human resources skills in employment services (and the corresponding design of specific training activities), both in terms of using digital modes of communication/support and health protection;
- The presence of a strong campaign by the PES in the reactivation stage through the design and implementation of renewed modalities for job placement, for example, through computer platforms specifically dedicated to the post lock-down stage and the strengthening of relations with employers for locating vacancies and the recruitment of the requested human resources;
- Along the same lines, the strengthening and deepening of activities and continuous monitoring methodologies regarding the different economic sectors’ productive reactivation processes in order to evaluate how they react and what jobs and job skills they need;
- The adjustment of unemployment regulations, such as possible extensions of unemployed persons’ rights and unemployment benefits to excluded categories, especially contributory social security;
- The deepening of digitalisation processes in administrative procedures, especially in procedures for granting unemployment benefits and for controlling conditionality.
The operational implementation of these organisational pathways poses significant challenges.
Firstly, in the coming months, the reorganisation of the employment services will face the need to serve large and growing masses of unemployed people, which will possibly prove burdensome for these services, forcing them to concentrate their actions on trying to place and/or retrain the jobless according to labour market needs (and opportunities). In this context of growing unemployment, urgent attention will have to be paid to the outbreak of focused and complex crises due to the closure or restructuring of companies both in specific productive sectors and in specialised areas (chains, districts, clusters) and/or characterised by the presence of large companies.
Secondly, in this context of occupational emergency, the key will be to accelerate modernisation processes, the latter being aimed at equipping the services with enhanced tools.
We refer in particular to:
- Associating unemployment benefits with active measures that enable services to quickly attend to the unemployed by designing and implementing personalised itineraries to face the transition (we know that time is a crucial factor since being jobless and inactive for long periods has a detrimental effect on people).
- Facilitating the flow of the training chain – the definition of personalised reintegration itineraries – professional training. If training cannot be used, the employment services will find themselves without a fundamental tool.
- Strengthening and developing new and renewed ways of linking with companies in order to be able, quickly, and in real time, to understand the needs of the productive sectors and find where the job vacancies are, as well as “adjust to them/retrain for them” in accordance with this demand.
- Along these lines, the employment services will have to strengthen their scouting actions (active search) for employment opportunities. This means strengthening the activities which, through appropriate methodologies and techniques, aim to identify and monitor over time the productive sectors and companies that can generate employment in a specific territorial area.
- On the other hand, in their daily operations regarding relational modalities with companies, the employment services will have to use strategic planning tools typically associated with the private sector, meaning tools that allow them to be permanently adapted to the business environment, in the most appropriate way. This drives the design and implementation of marketing activities for the promotion and management of services expressly dedicated to companies. Scouting employment opportunities and developing marketing activities for services aimed at companies will be an essential accompaniment to the reactivation processes of affected sectors and territories, so as to be able to channel the referrals of jobless people to possible job opportunities while identifying training and retraining needs.
Finally, a brief note about the digitisation of employment services and remote communication/support modalities. Prominent in the latter is the possible and probable digital divide for users, especially individuals and smaller companies. The strengthening of remote digital service modalities for users implies considering the high level of non-digitisation of a significant number of them, which, necessarily, requires identifying these user groups and channelling them, appropriately, towards face-to-face support or traditional support modes.
Digitisation seems a necessary future path for employment services, but the search for an appropriate balance between digital and face-to-face/traditional support must be taken into account so as not to run the risk of “excluding” a wide range of users or “complicating” things for them. The call for balance, however, is also due to the advisability of certain services using face-to-face support, which is indispensable for a profitable relationship between operators and users, for example, in specialised career guidance.
EUROsociAL+, a European Union programme for social cohesion, has strengthened its lines of support for the reform of employment services, especially in order to accompany their transformation into effective instruments for social and economic recovery. Such a consolidated tradition and greater European investment in the employment services’ systems can greatly help Latin American countries on their way along this path. Along with this, EUROsociAL+ is also highly attentive to the experiences and innovations that are generated in Latin America, in order to disseminate them in the region and in Europe itself.
[1] We are reminded that these brief reflections draw on the experiences of the employment services in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway.
