The ILO Skills Innovation Network was created in November 2020, following the 1st ILO Skills Challenge Innovation Call, as the first step in building an innovation ecosystem for skills development. The Network is driven by a selected group of top innovators who submitted the best applications to the 1st Call ("Core Group" members) and is open to all applicants from the past and future Calls and wider stakeholders.

In June 2021, the Network launched its LinkedIn page and the Core Group members have been actively expanding the scale and impact of the Network. Below are snapshots of the recent activities:

On 16 June, Nicole Bruskewitz from Coschool presented in the YouthForesight Knowledge Sharing webinar, co-hosted by ILO Decent Jobs for Youth, UNICEF Generation Unlimited, and Teach for All. Under the theme of “Promoting learning and skills through social entrepreneurship and innovation”, Nicole presented the CoSchool’s work in developing social and emotional skills of youth in Colombia.

On 25 June, a team from the Ministry of Labour and Employment Promotion, Government of Mexico City, led by Julio Guadarrama, presented in the ILO Community of Practice (CoP) on Digital Skills and Digitalization. The team presented 'DiCoDe' (Diagnóstico de Competencias Demandadas), a system developed to reduce information asymmetries between job seekers and employers, using web-scrapping techniques to retrieve job vacancies from job portals.

On 30 June, the Network held its first Skills Innovation Clinic. The Clinic is aimed at enabling the members’ learning to nurture and maximise their skills to develop and advance their projects for greater impact on the ground. As such, the Clinic is a place to: identify challenges and co-create solutions; foster peer-to-peer learning and mentoring through sharing good practices and lessons learned; and build successful collaborations. In this first session, Frei Sangil, founder of Layertech Software Labs Inc., presented the company’s work on ICT skills development and some of their main challenges. The participants actively suggested potential solutions for the presented challenges in curriculum development, access to employment, and delivery of skills training based on their experiences. The Network will organise a reflection session in July to summarize the solutions suggested by the skills innovators across the world.