Capacity building seminar for local development practitioners

Organised by the OECD LEED Trento Centre for Local Development

Trento, Italy,

10-12 June 2009

 

Background / The Seminar / Who / Material / Contact

 

Background

In the context of rising numbers of unemployment benefit applicants, longer unemployment spells and increasing numbers of job seekers who do not qualify for unemployment benefits, national and sub-national governments need to apply the right mix of policies, which can be difficult to decide upon. Choices are also constrained by reduced budgets. Employment and social policies and local strategies have to reconcile the need to prevent the loss of skills and get the highly skilled back into employment while also targeting the at-risk groups and providing adequate safety nets to job losers and low income families. It is important to address the immediate needs while also setting the ground for quality employment in the future.

 

The Seminar

Day 1. The capacity building seminar began with a one-day session open to a wide audience of policymakers and practitioners involved in tackling the impact of the crisis on jobs and skills. This session presented an assessment of the impact of the crisis on the labour market and discussed, using concrete examples, the value of various policy responses on the basis of three critical trade-offs:
Thematic Discussion 1		Investing in “winners” vs. reducing redundancies
Thematic Discussion 2		Are “green” jobs really an answer?
Thematic Discussion 3		Targeting the disadvantaged vs. supporting the easy to support
Days 2 and 3 (open to a selected group of 25 local development practitioners) built knowledge on:
Session 1		Tools and methods to measure local labour market trends, identify problems, prepare a diagnostic as a basis for strategy design
Session 2		Ways to adapt labour market policy to local needs
Session 3		Ways to integrate different instruments into a coherent local skills strategy

 

Who

Policy makers and practitioners directly involved in designing and putting in place local strategies to respond to rising unemployment (national and regional authorities, local employment services, ministries of labour, education and training institutions, regional development agencies, local partnerships …).

 

Material

Agenda

Download the presentations

 

Contact

For more information on the seminar, please contact Elisa.Campestrin@oecd.org