Policy Recommendations for European parliament and European commission
Edited on
21 July 2015
Read time: 3 minutes
Endorsed by the members of JobTown network and presented at the JobTown final conference in Brussels, March 2015.
The following article summarizes the key Policy Recommendations for European parliament and the European commission endorsed by the members of JobTown network.
“We, the members of the JobTown network – elected officials, public administrations and institutions, private sector stakeholders and engaged civil society representatives, from a diverse network of European cities and regions – offer the following concrete recommendations to the European Parliament and Commission. They are put forward in a spirit of constructive contribution to policy debate and the design of future EU actions and programmes. They are the result of three years experience developing on the ground responses to the Youth Unemployment crisis that is harming Europe in so many ways”.
The Recommendations:
EU competences and resources may well seem limited, however, at a time when resources are limited across Europe, well-targeted EU money – which is often a large part of a local or regional administration’s discretionary spending – has a great potential capacity to influence. As such it should be instrumentalised to drive key Youth Employment-related policies, actions and reforms.
We suggest the EU, through its policymaking, programmes and funding, support the following:
Capacity Building
Consultation
Capacity building for running effective Consultation processes.
- Complementary to the current emphasis on Cross-Sector Partnership, the EU should support capacity building (through training, exchange, dissemination, pilot projects) for all levels of public administration, in conducting effective, fruitful public consultation processes – very much from a practical point of view of ‘how to do it so it really works’, rather than excessive theoretical argumentation about ’why it’s good to consult’ (a view generally accepted in the abstract). Likewise, more and better consultation needs to be supported and encouraged, from higher levels of administration with lower ones — e.g. national with local.
Support the Unemployed
– Support to those young people experiencing unemployment, reducing isolation, skill erosion and other negatives resulting from extended periods of unemployment.
Labour Market Analysis
– Improve labour market analysis and forecasting available to local and regional administrations.
The EU should strive to raise minimum standards and interoperability of labour market data. Such data needs to facilitate concrete decision making on the ground; hence the data and projections need to offer enough specificity and relevance to be useful to a local context. Local administrations need a minimum autonomous capacity to supply themselves with data suited to their own needs. The use of newer low-cost efficient IT technologies needs to be encouraged and supported, to make labour market analysis accessible to administrations with limited resources.
Advocacy Skills
– Capacity building for local administrations, actors and civil society has to include advocacy skills.
Local Approaches 2 Business Environment
– The EU should do more to support and disseminate successful local approaches to improving the business environment.
Social Innovation & Social Enterprise (SI & SE)
– Practical understanding of: What Social Innovation and Social Enterprise are, what practical benefits they can bring, and how public administrations can support them.
Directed @ Youth
Guidance
– Improving guidance for career, study and training choices. Improving guidance for entrepreneurs and start-ups.
All Under One Roof
– The spread of the ‘All Under One Roof’ approach, to clustering and coordinating the range of diverse services that affect the same young people – taking inspiration from current practice in Germany and Finland.
NEETs
– Early action and prevention, addressing multiple causes and structural factors.
Better Youth Outreach & Cooperation with Youth Work
– Youth Work know how should be taken advantage of, to learn how best to design services, programmes, policy and actions concerning youth and in developing effective communication aimed at youth. The EU should capitalise on the specialist insight contained within organisations that work directly with young people and youth workers – such as SALTO-Youth.
Perception Problems of Professions
– Correct misperceptions, misunderstandings and lack of awareness, regarding the opportunities that in demand trades and technical fields offer. Within the broader framework of reducing mismatch in skills supply and demand – the EU should support projects and actions that are corrective to problems of perception, misperception and lack of awareness affecting, in particular, many of the trades and technical professions. Such communicative efforts should include, in their message, an emphasis on the modernisation of practice in many fields – about which the general public often retains anoutdated and unattractive image.
Entrepreneurial Education & Attitudes
– Education and training that reinforce generic entrepreneurial skills and attitudes (teamwork, initiative, problem solving etc.) early on and introduces awareness of entrepreneurship as part of the World of Work. Change attitudes and other conditioning factors attaching stigma or punishment to business failure.
Modernisation of Education – Generic/Soft Skills
– Better inclusion of generic (also known as ‘soft’) skills in educational objectives and approaches. Continued efforts to support the validation of generic skills, and more generally of competences acquired informally or non-formally.
Governance
National-local Coordination
– Macro to local coordination. Better linkages and conditionalities incentivising greater and more effective consultation and coordination between the national level — of designing youth employment policy, programmes and actions — and the local level, where those things are implemented and experienced, and succeed or fail. The purpose of such coordination is to make policies, programmes and actions more effective, and better suited to the specificities of divergent local circumstances.
Time Lag 4 New Education
– Improving throughput of systems leading to the appropriate redesign of teaching, curricula and training contents and approaches – stemming from the identification of particular labour market skills demands (present and forecasted). The EU should provide more incentive and support for pilot projects and actions for setting up, or improving, qualifications supply systems, adapted to specific functional (local/regional) labour market demand – improving and accelerating throughput, of systems for identifying labour market demand and translating that into adapted curricula.
User(citizen)-friendliness
– Reduce administrative barriers to projects with good potential to support young people’s transitions from school to labour market, or out of unemployment – particularly those projects aimed at young people with more disadvantaged and/or with complex multiple problems. Calls for project proposals affecting youth employment, need to be written and designed with greater concern for end user (citizen) experience, usability and accessibility. Language needs to be as accessible as possible, with criteria enforced for limiting excessive technical phrasing and jargon.
Functional Economic Areas (FEA)
– The adoption of ‘Functional Economic Area’ structures, to better coordinate policy, resources and action, across organisational and administrative boundaries.
Organisational Learning & EU Projects
– All projects funded by the EU, should incorporate into their design and implementation, measures and protocols to ensure organizational learning that is independent of any individual project participant, and that will live on after project completion. Such an approach has been piloted successfully in JobTown’s ‘Knowledge Transfer Workshop’ (KTW) practice, variations of which should be incorporated into future EU funded projects.
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