International approaches to tackling long-term unemployment … · 2015-03-12 · LEP Support (Solent, Dorset etc) History of EU Project working (Horizon 2020/FP7, LLP/Erasmus+,

International approaches to tackling long-term

unemployment amongst vulnerable groups

Dr Andrew Dean

Marchmont Observatory

University of Exeter

[email protected]

http://www.marchmont.ac.uk

Marchmont Observatory

Labour Market Observatory Specialist Research centre in Skills and Employment policy and practice Supporting the exchange of ideas and good practice Regional and local specialisms LEP Support (Solent, Dorset etc) History of EU Project working (Horizon 2020/FP7, LLP/Erasmus+, Progress etc) Action-based research



SUCCESSFUL METHODS FOR GETTING THE

LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYED INTO WORK:

A SHORT OVERVIEW

Emma Clarence (Policy Analyst) and Stina Heikkilä (Intern)

OECD LEED Trento Centre for Local Development


Australia

How Parramatta City Council in Australia are using social procurement to generate enhanced social

outcomes for its disadvantaged communities.

Canada

The BladeRunners Program helps youth (ages 15-30) with multiple barriers to employment, to build careers in

construction and other industries throughout the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada.

Belgium

Information on two projects in Antwerp and Alost in Belgium which focused on ‘experimental trajectories’

towards work for persons living in poverty.

Italy

Work integration is the main mission of ESEDRA which works in the energy and environmental sectors. Its

development has been driven by a desire to give work opportunities to disadvantaged people.

France

Ardelaine is a co-operative whose primary mission is sustainable local development by promoting respect for

the environment throughout the supply chain.

Belgium

Social flexibility and attention to local needs as the levers for large-scale sustainable job creation by the

Flemish organisation ‘vzw IN-Z’.


Understand the Geography and Context

All local interventions will have their own unusual/unique characteristics such as

geography, predominant sectors, emerging opportunities, partners, vulnerable

groups or financing and this should to be recognised from the outset.

Do not assume a project can simply be replicated in another area.

A number of projects (including from the UK) were very rooted within their

communities and had an advanced understanding of local conditions and labour

market.


Recognise Multiple Barriers

Whilst insufficient or a lack of recent skills constitute central barriers in today’s

labour markets, the situation is often made worse by the complexity of the barriers

people face.

In Belgium the Flemish public employment service’s ‘Back at Work’ programme

aims to help former prisoners to re-enter the job market. In this programme,

counsellors support detainees through labour market orientation, as well as

vocational and ‘soft’ skills training. To overcome the typical ‘black spots’ on

prisoners’ CVs, professional competences acquired in prison are certified.

Overcoming employers’ reluctance to hire former prisoners is a crucial aspect of

the programme. In the city of Hasselt, Back at Work developed a network

involving employers, the public sector and well as social actors who contributed to

improving communication around the issue. A brochure of tips and tricks for hiring

former prisoners, which reflected a wide-range of views, also helped to improve

the employment prospects of this hard-to-place group.

The Social Economy and Social Value

The social economy, organisations that operate in the space between the state

and the market, including co-operatives, associations, mutual, foundations and

social enterprises, is an important actor in supporting the long-term unemployed

into work (Noya and Clarence, 2007).

In Australia:

1. The social enterprise, Magic Green Clean, works with new refugees and

long-term unemployed immigrants helping them to develop both hard and

soft skills before finding employment in the open labour market. Improved

health and well-being and a cost benefit analysis demonstrate that, in the

long-term, there were significant gains in savings from unemployment

benefits, increased tax revenue and the economic value of individual

expenditure (Quinn, 2011).

2. Parramatta City Council use extensive Social Procurement.


Targeting disadvantaged areas

Another approach to reaching vulnerable groups in the labour market is area-

based initiatives, where particularly distressed areas, or ‘pockets of

deprivation’, with high concentrations of disadvantaged people, are targeted.

One example of such a strategic intervention is provided by Gloucester Works

in the UK. One key feature of success for Gloucester Works was the provision

of seamless and individualised support during the whole ‘client journey’ from

the development of individual action plans for skills development, to vacancy

matching and in-work support, proved to be successful practice to secure

sustained employment.


Broad-based partnerships

Partnerships can play a critical role in overcoming labour market barriers at the

local level by connecting policies and building links between local actors, as

well as between various government actors, thereby enhancing both the

effectiveness and efficiency of local employment service delivery.

An example from the Lower Rio Grande Valley in lower Texas, USA, shows

how a strategic partnership can connect regional economic development to

employment and skills for the benefit of local populations. The initiative was led

by the McAllen Economic Development Corporation and the Greater McAllen

Alliance recruitment entity, which together with local actors formulated a

strongly skill-based vision for the region to become a ‘rapid response

manufacturing centre’. The regional workforce development board, Workforce

Solutions, together with South Texas College and other educational institutions,

ensured that training was provided in order to create a workforce that matched

the new economic strategy. Overall, more than 500 employers and almost 100,

000 jobs were attracted to the region, lowering unemployment rates in McAllen

by more than half since the early 1990s (Froy and Giguère, 2010).


Local flexibility

To enable local actors to respond to the specific labour market barriers found in

their areas, the need for flexibility for local employment services in delivering

training and employment programmes has been repeatedly stressed in the

literature (Giguère and Froy, 2009; Froy et al., 2011).

Denmark provides an example of the value of local flexibility. In 2007 state

employment agencies were abolished and all administrative matters connected

to active labour market policies were transferred to local authorities (Crowley et

al., 2013). Four years after the reform, 79% municipal job centre managers

identified that there were no local labour market priorities which they felt unable

to address.


Targeting disadvantaged youth

Targeting services at young people means that individualised responses can be

developed which both address the specific barriers young people confront on the

labour market and meet their specific needs. Within the ‘youth’ category, further

targeting may be undertaken, such as spatially (community or neighbourhood), or at

specific subgroups, such as sex or ethnic minority groupings, or disadvantaged

youth.

BladeRunners in British Columbia (Canada) is an effective example of targeted

support. This government-sponsored programme helps disadvantaged young

people (aged 15-30) to overcome multiple barriers to employment and to build

careers in construction and other industries. A three-week training course, including

both soft and hard skills, and direct job placements (the programme has a 77%

placement rate) is provided. Moreover, BladeRunners offers extensive individual

support services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for an indeterminate period of

time after placement.


Seek sustainability and added value

The aligning of different strands of activity such as regeneration, mainstream

funding, charitable donation and project funding can be complicated, but it can

also produce added-value through real benefits in scale. Drawing down

mainstream funding should accentuate sustainability.

The ESEDRA Co-operative in Italy are examples of how voluntary and

community level organisations can successfully access mainstream funding.


Person-centred

Long-term unemployed adults often have significant, and different, barriers to

successful engagement within the labour market. Identifying individual needs and

developing a personalised intervention will enhance both the likelihood of success

and the experience of the individual receiving support. In some cases, with

projects seeking to engage over the longer term with particularly excluded

individuals, the jobseekers are not treated as clients or customers but as partners

within the project.

BladeRunners recognised the importance of the enthusiastic co-ordinators, who

grew in their jobs during the process and really built up a relation of trust and

confidence with the jobseekers. Similarly, the personalised mentoring roles in the

Antwerp and Alost examples were critical to the project’s success.


SKILLS

In the context of a knowledge-based economy, skills are the global currency of

the 21st century and therefore ensuring that people have the necessary skills for

a rapidly evolving labour market is of the utmost importance (OECD 2012c).

• Skills mismatch

• No just Supply – Drive up demand

• Target the lower-skilled

In China, vocational training for rural migrant workers is particularly focussed on

the demand for skills created by local industrial restructuring, technological

upgrading and new, state-sponsored construction projects.

Chile has had successful experiences of skills upgrading in its fruit and vegetable

industries. The Labour Skills Certification Programme awards certificates that

recognise workers’ competencies regardless of how they were achieved (APEL).

Moreover, training courses are made available to workers whose informal skills

are not sufficient in order to allow them to obtain certification.


SKILLS (contd…) and TRANSITIONS

Vocational Education and Training

The need to be ‘employable’ and the need for a ‘highly skilled workforce’ are

not a cure-all. We need to drive the demand for skills not just the supply.

One key determinant of success for the German VET system is the high

engagement of both employers, including small and medium sized enterprises,

and other social partners, such as trade unions and chambers of commerce,

not only in providing actual placements, but also in helping to create relevant

curricula that address skills needs.

Facilitating the transition from school to work

In parts of the USA, industries, education systems and employment services

have collaborated to map out ‘industry clusters’ and outline associated skill

requirements and ‘career pathways’ for those entering, and those in, the labour

market.

LMI in the US is way ahead of UK in terms of enabling individuals to trace

career paths and earnings to geographies. LMI for All is a step towards tackling

this.


Changing public sector roles and finance mechanisms

In many countries, the public sector has a long and distinguished history of

financing and managing projects and programmes with excluded groups and

individuals. In a world of shrinking financial capacity for delivering such

programmes, the public sector needs to embrace a new role as an enabler of

social innovation. This could involve a shift to a more conscious and systematic

approach to public sector working and a shift from running tasks and projects

to orchestrating the processes of co-creation within communities and in

partnership with community-level partners: seeking not to do things ‘for’ people,

but instead, to do them ‘with’ people.

Peter Ramsden’s OECD LEED report highlights these changes and the role

that innovative finance might need to play. Whether linking internal positive

training and recruitment practices to the procurement process, or taking

advantage of the emergence of new financing techniques such as crowd-

funding and microfinance, innovative financing will play an ever more important

role in funding community level programmes.


Evaluation and dissemination

Ensuring lessons are captured through evaluation and/or active dissemination

and mainstreaming is crucial to ensuring new projects no longer need to ‘re-

invent the wheel’ and should be a step towards sustainability.

Effective evaluation need not be costly. It should be built into new programmes

from their commencement and should seek to inform both the development of

the programme, and others about its successful and transferable lessons.

Even universities need money….


Other Generic Lessons

• Cross-cutting approaches

As the broad range of barriers to employment highlight, the factors which

contribute to long-term unemployment are complex and multi-faceted. Given

this, it is crucial that labour market interventions take into account how actions

in one area can have an impact, positive or negative, on other areas of activity.

• Avoid departments working in silos

Long-term unemployment is a policing, health, social services, economic,

social and personal issue. Funding and support shouldn’t just be ‘skills’ etc…

In Norway, social workers often work in the same centres that in the UK would

be largely staffed by youth workers only.

• Make training work-relevant

• Don’t forget lifelong learning


Remember the Personal…

The OECD continues to argue, rightly, that proper co-ordination of regional and local labour

markets is needed to find solutions to some of their most important deficiencies. Long-term

unemployment may be around for some time to come, but the work demonstrates that we

can, already, design effective programmes to mitigate its impact on those groups

that are already vulnerable.

_________________________________________________________________________

Immediate Barriers Long-term Barriers

Low skills/skills not in demand Low aspirations

Lack of (recent) work experience Weak financial resources (and its consequences)

Low motivation Absence of positive social networks

Lack of availability Isolation and pockets of deprivation

Lack of employer understanding Poor access to services

Discrimination Health issues

Documents

International approaches to tackling long-term unemployment … · 2015-03-12 · LEP Support (Solent, Dorset etc) History of EU Project working (Horizon 2020/FP7, LLP/Erasmus+,