Emploi

Enterprises are a key provider of education and training for adults across OECD countries. Yet, policy-makers lack a detailed understanding of how training in enterprises takes place. This report opens the black box of training and informal learning in enterprises by providing in-depth insights on: i) what training and learning opportunities enterprises provide; ii) why they provide training (or not); and iii) how they make decisions about training. It presents new evidence from 100 qualitative cases studies in five countries: Austria, Estonia, France, Ireland and Italy. The findings will assist governments and social partners in designing and implementing better policies in support of training in enterprises.

This report offers an initial overview of the available information regarding the circumstances, nature and outcomes of the education of schoolchildren during the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns of March-April 2020. Its purpose is primarily descriptive: it presents information from high quality quantitative studies on the experience of learning during this period in order to ground the examination and discussion of these issues in empirical examples. Information is presented on three interrelated topics: the nature of the educational experience during the period of lockdowns and school closures; the home environment in which education took place for the vast majority of schoolchildren; the effects on the mental health and learning outcomes for children during this period. The data come primarily from 5 countries (France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States) with additional information on some aspects for 6 additional countries (Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands). This report will be of interest to policy makers, academics, education stakeholders and anyone interested in a first international empirical analysis of the effects of the pandemic on the lives and education of schoolchildren.

Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.

La révolution technologique qui a marqué les dernières décennies du XXe siècle a entraîné une forte augmentation de la demande de facultés de traitement de l’information et d’autres compétences cognitives et interpersonnelles sur le marché du travail. Sur la base des résultats des 33 pays et régions ayant participé aux deux premières vagues de l'Enquête sur les compétences des adultes en 2011-12 et 2014-15, ce rapport décrit les compétences dans trois domaines de traitement de l'information et examine comment les compétences sont liées au marché du travail et aux résultats sociaux. Il décrit notamment les résultats des six pays ayant participé à la troisième vague du premier cycle du PIAAC en 2017-18 (Équateur, États-Unis, Hongrie, Kazakhstan, Mexique et Pérou). L’Évaluation des compétences des adultes, un produit du Programme de l’OCDE pour l’évaluation internationale des compétences des adultes (PIAAC), a été conçue pour montrer dans quelle mesure les individus possèdent certaines de ces facultés et compétences clés et comment ils les utilisent dans le cadre professionnel et dans la vie privée. Cette enquête, la première du genre, évalue directement le niveau de compétence dans trois domaines du traitement de l’information : la littératie, la numératie et la résolution de problèmes.

Countries need to urgently scale-up and upgrade their adult learning systems to help people adapt to the future world of work. Today, only two in five adults across the EU and OECD participate in education and training in any given year, according to the OECD Survey of Adults Skills. Participation is even lower among disadvantaged adults, such as those with low skill levels or in jobs at high risk of automation. For adult learning systems to be future-ready, governments must increase their efforts to engage more adults in continuous learning throughout their lives. While much has been written about the need for progress, it is less clear how adult learning participation can be increased in practice. Many good ideas struggle to translate into real change on the ground, as they get stuck in the reality of policy implementation. This report aims to understand the factors that make adult learning reforms succeed. It identifies lessons from six countries that have significantly increased participation over the past decades: Austria, Estonia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Singapore. To shed light on how these countries achieved this objective, this study looks at the details of reform design, implementation and evaluation.

This edition of the Reader’s Companion accompanies Skills Matter: Additional Results from the Survey of Adult Skills that reports the results from the 39 countries and regions that participated in the 3 rounds of data collection in the first cycle of PIAAC, with a particular focus on the 6 countries that participated in the third round of the study (Ecuador, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru and the United States). It describes the design and methodology of the survey and its relationship to other international assessments of young students and adults. The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in several information-processing skills – namely literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments.

This report on Italy is the sixth country study published in a series of reports looking into how policies connect people with jobs. It discusses how active labour market policies in Italy are performing both on the national and the regional level, focussing particularly on the reform process in the system of public employment services initiated by the Jobs Act. The ongoing reform has good potential to improve the performance of employment services in Italy, particularly if the stakeholders of the system cooperate to establish a binding performance management framework and develop national IT infrastructure supporting the tasks of the local offices to serve jobseekers and employers. The National Agency for Active Labour Market Policies has a key role in encouraging the cooperation between the stakeholders, leading the development of new tools and methodologies and thus supporting the local employment offices to implement the new service model. Besides the general reform process, the review looks at some specific approaches regarding providing employment services in Italy – using jobseeker profiling tools to target active labour market policies; increasing quality and capacity of employment services by contracting out employment services to private service providers; and reaching out to employers and advancing demand-side services.

This report focuses on the local level integration of migrants in Rome, and provides information on the national framework for integration in Italy. While the study assumes that local authorities are at the forefront of migrant integration – providing information and essential services, ensuring access to education and the labour market, overcoming the barriers for full inclusion in the host society, and managing conflicts – local authorities are not alone. This report stresses the importance of multi-level governance of migrant integration, highlighting the key role of third sector enterprises, NGOs, business, faith-based organisations and unions. It identifies and shares selected local actions and governance practices to manage the short- and long-term effects of migration flows, and provides an international comparative of practices implemented by other EU cities, highlighting the most effective measures and lessons learned.

While Italy has made major progress in the past decade to up-skill its population and workers, further efforts are needed to improve access to good quality adult learning opportunities. Training funds represent one important tool through which Italy could face the pressures brought about by the mega-trends, and equip adults and workers with the skills needed to thrive in the labour market and society. This report analyses how training funds are designed, used, and monitored, and provides actionable policy recommendations to ensure that they are put to their most effective use.