How can Public Employment Services provide digital services to vulnerable jobseekers?

Digital service delivery is omnipresent in the service offer provided by Public Employment Services and has proved to be effective, in particular, for jobseekers who are closer to the labour market. This, however, raises the question of whether and how to provide services online to jobseekers who either have no or very low levels of digital skills or who do not have the resources to access digital services.

The Thematic Review Workshop (held on 7/11/23 in Zagreb)  focused on: (1) outreach to vulnerable jobseekers; (2) diagnosis of (digital) skills shortages; (3) providing effective digital skills training and (4) online delivery of counselling and complementary services. The discussions centred around the needs of long-term unemployed and NEETs. A number of PES, including the host Croatian PES have made significant strides in diagnosing lack of digital skills, providing (online) career guidance in an accessible format and have developed digital skills courses. However, there are a number of situations, including outreach and employment counselling, where offline service delivery still remains crucial. Finally, as pointed out by Márton Csillag in the Thematic Paper there is significant room for experimentation on the delivery of online services, to understand better what precise ways of nudging vulnerable jobseekers to take up and finish digital skills training works best.  

The BI (Márton Csillag) was commissioned to serve as thematic expert for the EU Network of Public Employment services, which is financed by the European Union.