ILO brings Caribbean partners together to strengthen skills intelligence

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (ILO News) — A pilot webinar organized and hosted by the International Labour Organization on 2 September marked the first step towards developing STREAM - Skills Tracking and Research for Adapting Markets - a regional space where Caribbean stakeholders can strengthen how they understand changing skills needs, learn from one another and turn evidence into action.

At its simplest, skills intelligence means gathering and interpreting information about the skills workers have, the skills employers need and how demand is changing – then using that evidence to make better decisions about education, training and workforce development.

That task is becoming increasingly important in the Caribbean. Persistent sector-level skills mismatches and shortages of both technical and transferable skills across the region have been identified by Caribbean leaders among other regional labour challenges. Skills mismatches (which occur when available skills do not correspond with those needed in the labour market), can affect employment, productivity and income. However, addressing mismatches requires more than having data. ILO engagements with regional stakeholders repeatedly point to the need for stronger institutional arrangements, better coordination, analytical capacity, appropriate methods and sustained dialogue among governments, employers and workers. Labour-market information and data are only useful when they are embedded in systems that can interpret them and use them for decision-making.

The introductory webinar aimed at policy makers and technical officials, explored how STREAM could help Caribbean countries make better use of labour-market evidence to understand and respond to changing skills needs. That includes identifying and drawing together information that already exists, recognizing where important gaps remain, strengthening countries’ capacity to analyse and interpret the evidence, and connecting it more effectively to decisions on training, education and workforce policy showed that the challenge is not simply whether data exist. The discussion delved into how countries can ask the right questions, combine information from sources such as household surveys, censuses and administrative records, and analyse skills needs at sector level.

Beyond finding and analysing the evidence, the webinar also pointed to another common challenge: ensuring that empirical evidence reaches the institutions and people who can act on it. Labour-market information can remain in institutional silos, cooperation among employers, policymakers and training institutions can be uneven, and activity in the informal economy can be difficult to capture. These gaps make it harder to translate evidence into changes in curricula, training provision and workforce planning. Therefore, establishing coordination among all stakeholders of labour market information systems remains essential.

For Caribbean economies this matters, because decisions about education and training made today must respond to labour markets that are continually changing. STREAM is intended to help countries move from reacting to skills shortages after they emerge towards anticipating changing needs and using that evidence to align training and education more closely with opportunities in the labour market.

“The value of skills intelligence is not simply in producing more data. It is in bringing the institutions that generate evidence together with the people who use it, so that changing skills needs can be identified earlier and translated into better decisions on training, curricula and workforce development.” Ilca Webster, ILO Specialist on Skills and Lifelong Learning

As STREAM develops, the crucial connection between evidence and action will remain central. Regular STREAM sessions are planned to deepen understanding of key concepts, share knowledge products and work through specific implementation challenges. Future sessions are also expected to bring in expertise on labour demand and practical approaches from external practitioners. Over time, these exchanges are intended to build the peer learning and collaboration needed for a stronger regional community of practice across the Caribbean on skills intelligence.