Lifelong guidance policy and practice in the EU

A study on lifelong guidance (LLG) policy and practice in the EU focusing on trends, challenges and opportunities. Lifelong guidance aims to provide career development support for individuals of all ages, at all career stages. It includes careers information, advice, counselling, assessment of skills and mentoring

Getting Real: Time to Re-Invest in the Public Employment Service

In this paper, NELP advocates for renewed focus on our nation's public reemployment services. First, we recommend significantly increasing the amount of federal funding for the Employment Service that is a part of the nationwide system of One-Stop Career Centers. Doing so would provide more workers with improved job placement services, in-person job search assistance, and pre-training counseling. Second, we recommend placing programmatic priority on unemployment insurance recipients who are most likely to have trouble finding a new job

Labour Market Flexibility in Estonia: What More Can Be Done?

In mid-2008, high employment and low unemployment rates characterised the Estonian labour market in comparison with the average of the EU15 countries. While aggregate outcomes improved during 2000 07, large inequalities persisted across regions, ethnic groups, and workers with different skill levels. As Estonia entered recession in 2008, the unemployment rate almost doubled between the 2nd and the 4th quarter, and is expected to rise further in 2009 and 2010. More flexible labour markets will be a key adjustment mechanism during the recession as well as in the medium term if Estonia is to become a knowledge based economy. Given the currency board arrangement and low synchronisation with the euro area, flexibility is also needed to cushion asymmetric shocks. In December 2008, parliament adopted the new Employment Contract Act, deregulating employment protection while increasing income security of the unemployed. This paper discusses options for removing the remaining barriers that impede worker reallocation across jobs, sectors, and regions into more productive activities.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64375/1/wp964.pd

Extending working life in Belgium. CEPS Working Document No. 386, 22 November 2013

This report aims at understanding how persons aged 50 years and older are and can be integrated into the working society in Belgium. We are interested in how people in this age group can be induced to engage in various forms of employment and lifelong learning. Based on secondary literature, descriptive databases as well as interviews with experts and focus groups, we find that the discussion on active ageing in Belgium is well advanced with numerous contributions by academics, stakeholders, social partners, the public administration and interest groups. The wish to retire at 60 is widely shared, but at the same time the majority of Belgium’s elderly are able and would be willing to work under specific conditions. Therefore, we recommend that Belgium should invest in more flexible systems including a revision of the tax scheme, such as the part-time retirement system proposed by the insurance company Delta Lloyd. An equally relevant recommendation would be to ensure that public employment agencies, employers and agencies that provide training encourage all workers to work and learn regardless of their age

Skills for self employment

This small scale, explorative research study looks at the hitherto relatively under-researched question of the role of skills and training in the development of self employment. It draws on a literature review, data analysis from the Labour Force Survey, and a series of expert interviews. We summarise here the main findings from the research and, where appropriate, we highlight possible policy implications of those findings, although given the small scale, exploratory nature of the study, some of these issues would benefit from further investigation(and the report highlights possible avenues for new research to fill these gaps: see section 6.7). In thinking about policy we do not, for the most part, recommend specific interventions. Rather we highlight the kinds of considerations that policy-makers should be aware of when designing interventions" -- page i (Evidence Report). "This Annex presents an analysis of Labour Force Survey data, to provide descriptive statistics on the nature and extent of self-employment in the UK" -- page 1 (Annex)

A Novel Approach for Learning How to Automatically Match Job Offers and Candidate Profiles

Automatic matching of job offers and job candidates is a major problem for a number of organizations and job applicants that if it were successfully addressed could have a positive impact in many countries around the world. In this context, it is widely accepted that semi-automatic matching algorithms between job and candidate profiles would provide a vital technology for making the recruitment processes faster, more accurate and transparent. In this work, we present our research towards achieving a realistic matching approach for satisfactorily addressing this challenge. This novel approach relies on a matching learning solution aiming to learn from past solved cases in order to accurately predict the results in new situations. An empirical study shows us that our approach is able to beat solutions with no learning capabilities by a wide margin.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

LABOUR MARKET FLEXIBILITY IN ESTONIA: WHAT MORE CAN BE DONE?

In mid-2008, high employment and low unemployment rates characterised the Estonian labour market in comparison with the average of the EU15 countries. While aggregate outcomes improved during 2000 07, large inequalities persisted across regions, ethnic groups, and workers with different skill levels. As Estonia entered recession in 2008, the unemployment rate almost doubled between the 2nd and the 4th quarter, and is expected to rise further in 2009 and 2010. More flexible labour markets will be a key adjustment mechanism during the recession as well as in the medium term if Estonia is to become a knowledge based economy. Given the currency board arrangement and low synchronisation with the euro area, flexibility is also needed to cushion asymmetric shocks. In December 2008, parliament adopted the new Employment Contract Act, deregulating employment protection while increasing income security of the unemployed. This paper discusses options for removing the remaining barriers that impede worker reallocation across jobs, sectors, and regions into more productive activities.Labour market policies; flexibility; Estonia.