Skills and employability
Inadequate education and skills development keep economies trapped in a vicious circle of low education, low productivity and poverty. Indeed, skills development is central to improving productivity. In turn, productivity is an important source of improved living standards and growth. Effective skills development systems – which connect education to technical training, technical training to labour market entry and labour market entry to lifelong learning – can help countries sustain productivity growth and translate that growth into more and better jobs. As such it is essential to develop strategies to upgrade and enhance the relevance of skills training and to improve access to skills for more women and men.
Governments, employers’ associations and trade unions in the Arab Region are working to improve the quality and relevance of training and employment services in order to improve the employability of workers and the productivity and competitiveness of enterprises.
Within this context, the Regional office for Arab States helps its constituents to apply the policy recommendations arrived at through tripartite consultations on skills development within the Decent Work agenda (see Key Resources) to their circumstances and priorities. It provides, policy advice, technical assistance and knowledge development to help constituents in the following areas:
Skills development
The ILO works with member States to reform and strengthen their national skills policies and improve their training systems. Experience shows that an enabling framework linking skills development to productivity, employment, development and decent work targets three main objectives:
- matching training to demand for skills in the labour market;
- helping workers and enterprises adjust to technological or market changes, making it easier to move from declining or low productivity activities to growing and higher productivity activities through re-skilling and lifelong learning; and
- building and sustaining competencies for future labour market needs, focusing on the strategic role of education and training policies in triggering and continuously fuelling innovation, enterprise development, technological change and competitiveness.
Coordinated efforts are needed to promote skills development at the workplace and along value chains, to help manage the drivers of change at work today, among them, new technologies and climate change, and to integrate skills development into national and sector development strategies. ILO work in this area supports mechanisms, institutions, and social dialogue that can sustain inter-ministerial coordination and improve the early identification of skill needs and reduction of skill gaps.
Youth employment
Skills development is a primary means of enabling young people to make a smooth transition to work. A comprehensive approach is required to integrate young women and men in the labour market, including relevant and quality skills training, labour market information, career guidance and employment services, recognition of prior learning, incorporating entrepreneurship with training and effective skills forecasting. Improved basic education and core work skills are particularly important to enable youth to engage in lifelong learning as well as transition to the labour market.
Persons with disabilities
Decent work is the ILO's primary goal for everyone, including persons with disabilities. The ILO has worked for over 50 years to promote skills development and employment opportunities for people with disabilities based on the principles of equal opportunity, equal treatment, mainstreaming into vocational rehabilitation and employment services programmes and community involvement. The principle of non-discrimination is increasingly emphasized as disability issues have come to be seen as human rights issues. The ILO works to achieve this goal through promoting labour standards, advocacy, knowledge-building on the training and employment of people with disabilities and technical cooperation services and partnerships, both within the ILO and externally. A strategy of including consideration of persons with disabilities in the training and employment promotion policies and programmes of the ILO and of constituents is currently being developed.
Public employment services
The basic mandate of Public Employment Services (PES) is to facilitate the adjustment of firms and workers to changing labour market conditions. PES are usually the primary government institution responsible for implementing a variety of active labour market programmes including the provision of career guidance and labour exchange services.The ILO conducts assessments of national employment services which result in concrete recommendations to improve their capacity to deliver and monitor the impact of active labour market programmes. Given recent international trends in the growth of private employment agencies and the outsourcing of public services, the ILO also supports new ways for public and private agencies to work together. The ILO’s focus in the area of employment services is to:
- support the reform and modernization of public employment services
- promote the appropriate regulation of private employment agencies
- promote cooperation between public employment services and private employment agencies
Situation Analysis
While recognizing the variety of challenges facing individual countries, the common problem identified across the Arab region is that investments in education and training are not yet resulting in satisfactory levels of productive employment. Young people face uncertainty in moving from education into decent work. Enterprises often have trouble finding enough people with the skills they need to be able to expand their business or adopt new technologies. And the opportunities for employment growth due to industrial diversification, trade patterns, may be jeopardized because skills development systems are not oriented towards preparing the workforce for the labour market of the future.
Thus there are cases of high unemployment among workers, or employment concentrated in work of low productivity in the informal economy, coinciding with labour shortages for enterprises. Skill gaps are not the only likely explanation, of course. Labour market conditions, especially prevailing wages, the industrial structure of the economy and population growth are other key explanatory factors.
In terms of employment services, almost all Arab countries provide public employment services and which are commonly integrated in the Ministry of Labour. These services have increasingly been used both as an instrument for government employment policies and as a labour market adjustment program designed to tackle unemployment issues. Often, however, many of the public employment services in the region fail to make an impact in linking job seekers with available jobs and/or providing other support services. In some countries, they are not efficient in terms of infrastructure, staff competences, and information systems, to be able to actively respond to the needs of job seekers and employers, who are therefore reluctant to use their services.
Strategy of the ILO Regional Office
The principal issue of skills mismatch and persistent unsatisfactory employment outcomes of education and training is broken down into three policy challenges and responses:
Relevance of training – linking skills demand and supply;
Quality of training – standards and accountability; and
Access to training – availability of skills development opportunities, encompassing equity and labour market issues.
It should be noted at the outset that policy objectives and responses in the area of skills development are closely related to the other key employment issues in the Arab region: a top priority of skills development is to improve youth employment; workplace learning is an important means of increasing skills and fostering enterprise development; and linking skills development to employment opportunities depends on the success of macro-economic policies to spur job-rich growth.
Currently the regional office is undertaking several technical cooperation projects in there areas of skills development and employment services. Other activities includes policy advisory services.
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