The pandemic increases the need for effective upskilling programmes

28/01/2021

The COVID-19 pandemic might accelerate the automatisation of certain tasks at the workplace. This, in turn, will transform certain jobs, or cause them to vanish, even sooner than predicted. What kind of innovative upskilling programmes can public employment services (PES) provide to prevent unemployment in this difficult situation?

Public employment services need to respond quickly and effectively to the labour market challenges brought about by the pandemic. This requires cooperation with employers and other governmental organisations.

Recognizing this need, public employment services across Europe have started to review trainings and services available for employees. For example, building on the social responsibility efforts of several IT companies, a number of PES has started to offer online trainings to develop basic digital competencies, as well as to provide digital tools free of charge for those in need.

Márton Csillag, senior researcher at BI has examined upskilling trainings and services available for employees and the role of PES in providing such trainings for the Network of European Public Employment Services in a thematic paper. The analysis also contains a review of promising good-practices, innovative solutions, policy issues, and recent academic research.

In addition, the analysis also cites the discussions of the workshop „Upskilling, reskilling and prevention in times of crisis”, which took place on 23-24 October 2020 with the contribution of BI.

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