Frictional unemployment – the unpleasant interval experienced when between jobs - regularly gets a lot of bad press. It is often blamed for market inconsistency, a lack of long-term economic and business vision and family/societal instability.
Nevertheless, the degree to which some countries have salvaged this dire situation has been and continues to be demonstrated today, and particularly in the wider Mediterranean region.
On our third session of the Conference’s first day -September 17th in Tunis – the participants will witness first-hand how job intermediation services provided by the Tunisian National Employment Agency can be optimised and how its experience can be leveraged for other countries in the region. Participants will also be exposed to a wealth of good practices from other countries’ longstanding experience in job intermediation and Public Employment Services (PES).
With 91 nationwide offices, Tunisia’s PES has been offering jobs to almost half a million jobseekers (close to 60% of the country’s unemployed people) year after year since 2010. During this session, Tunisia’s PES examples will have the opportunity to showcase why and how it continues to achieve results. Some of these are attributed to a lean, seamless and well-informed labour market database, and others to consistent reporting and monitoring - hence re-feeding and renovating the process towards achieving transparency and SMART results.
The Secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean has already begun to propel a valuable multi-stakeholder community around the debate of job intermediation and issues such as how to outline the role of local and regional authorities in extending the network of PES; which successful job intermediation stories can be identified in, for instance, Tunisia, Morocco or Turkey, and thereafter transferred to other countries, etc.