1.1. Analysis of the problem:

The company restructuring process taking place in Europe, resulting not only from the recent serious crisis but also from the liberalisation of world markets and the expansion of the internal market, with accompanying changes in international trade, models of consumption and demand and technological development, poses specific challenges to modern society.
 

Levels of production and employment now depend directly on the way in which companies, regions and countries can prepare for and manage processes of change in their production specialisation models.

These situations challenge the current social balance – particularly in countries that are most exposed to economic fluctuations – but they also present an opportunity to speed up economic growth and improvements in the standard of living.
 

It is clearly necessary to deal with industrial restructuring using consistent and effective strategies that combine a strengthening of the competitiveness of the production economy and the adaptability of companies and workers with measures of a social nature that contribute to attenuating the negative impacts of these actions, particularly among unskilled workers, who are often geographically concentrated.
 

The success of an industrial restructuring strategy is based essentially on three factors:

1.2. The background: local policies and development

“Local development” has grown increasingly important over the past few decades and has triggered a process of development based on assessing specific local requirements and vocations. The creation of new national and Community intervention tools, the increasing demands for recognition of their role made by local players, coupled with decentralisation and economic globalisation processes have led to local development targets becoming absolutely central to Community, national and regional policies.

This has led to a proliferation of tools, each of them with different purposes and themes, accompanied by theories and methods developed in order to understand the developments that have taken place and quantify the results achieved.

Local development policies are understood to be policies that allow a climate to be created that is favourable to making the most of local resources (environmental, cultural, human …). Development in this direction is considered to be a “strategic objective”, the achievement of which is related to the creation and implementation of a series of policies, services and devices which differ from one another but are cross-integrated based on the result being pursued. 

As a result, the better planning of economic, financial, infrastructure, urban planning, environmental, social, employment and training policies contributes not only to improving the individual sectors to which they relate but also to overall development.

In particular, if they are appropriately coordinated and integrated in accordance with local requirements, these policies can contribute to reducing inequalities between the various geographical areas of the respective countries. At local level there are three important elements that are important in allowing local systems to gear their development prospects to benefit from globalisation:

2. Project Objectives and Partnership

2.1 Objectives

Therefore to create a “working network” in a framework of Mutual Learning, the main objectives of which were:

The project intends to provide local areas and decision-makers at all levels with a system that is able:

to activate new circuits for ensuring employability and maintaining levels of employment

to devise innovative ways to develop flexibility and integration in the context of development policies and the provision of training/retraining

to promote a stable connection between welfare and training, employment and development activities, ensuring that requirements are anticipated as much as possible.

to reduce unemployment and social difficulties in the context of company crises

The actions planned were intended:

To act on the network system in order:

to observe the various operating methods at transnational level, the projects carried out, the know-how implemented, good practices and the potential for others to benefit from them

to identify the new critical areas, the efficient and effective aspects of current processes, the requirements of the network

to analyse the way in which the different local systems operate in dealing with crisis situations

to recommend an integrated system of actions in the crisis situations that develop in companies.

2.2. Partnership

The project was proposed by the EVTA network, which consists of organisations from 16 different European countries, all operating in the field of vocational training. EVTA supports its members in responding to the challenges of growth, competitiveness and social cohesion in the field of Lifelong Learning. EVTA is finding ways of enabling vocational training professionals to learn from each other and to apply new creative and innovative tools to new and existing problems in the field of lifelong learning and vocational training in particular. EVTA sees it as one of the priorities and responsibilities to share and make the most of professional knowledge and experience in this field.

Partners:

IEFP (PT) also participated in the working seminars

A vital contribution to administering and raising standards in the training system can be made by transferring and making the most of experiences. The mechanisms for achieving this form part of measures aimed at supporting integration between education, training and work.

During the current phase of turbulent change, during which the opportunities created by new regulatory and institutional frameworks at regional, national and Community level are being tested and explored, there is a need for common and shared methods and practices to be gradually defined which can create uniformity in the system, encouraging debate and identifying synergies between the various parties operating in it, particularly in a transnational context.

This need is closely connected with the existence and use of devices that allow experience to be determined and, on this basis, allow the methods, terms and conditions for transferring the most important devices to other geographical contexts to be established and a culture of innovation and experimentation based on the experience acquired because of them to be disseminated, promoting the establishment of exchange, comparison and discussion practices and synergy between the various parties operating in different contexts and situations.

With this in mind, specific discussion and research work was carried out – in a mutual learning context - in order to organise and disseminate the most successful experiences (policies, devices…) in the context of training activities carried out as part of local development policies and active labour policies, specifically those related to crisis situations and the organisation of consistent responses in terms of the effectiveness of results achieved.

The strategy followed is intended to identify, select and discuss a number of “good practices”, these being actions that are not necessarily evaluated on the basis of their results.

The assessment made by the individual in charge of the process is as important as the assessment made by other people involved in the system (policy implementors and stakeholders), who can examine and compare this practice with their own in order to acquire and improve their ability to organise increasingly effective and efficient devices with which to achieve the final result.

In this respect, rather than leaving them to be assessed solely by their main operator, who may legitimately consider them to be good practices, all practices should be linked both to efficiency and effectiveness indicators and to the overall system of entities involved in implementing the policies. There has to be an opportunity for everyone to learn, compare and improve their practices, comparing them to each other.

The assessment of a practice as “good” must be based on the results and on a comparison of practices by other service providers in the system and stakeholders (particularly those for whom the policies are intended).

The temptation for practice creators to describe their practices as good and create a kind of self-referencing of the technical and institutional authors of policies must be abandoned, seeking objective mechanisms for other operators in the system to check and compare everybody’s practices (theirs and those of others).

To begin with, all practices have to be identified, including bad practices, because many lessons can be learnt from these too.

Rather than viewing all practices as good or bad, however, we should perhaps examine our practices, which are complex for so many reasons, more realistically as a combination of positive and less positive dimensions.

For all these reasons, identifying all practices seems fundamental as a starting point for a detailed assessment by all actors involved in the system of policies.

Reflection and mutual learning were achieved by holding seminars. Following the necessary initial research phase, therefore, (which took place in each individual partner territory) aimed at identifying and drawing up an initial directory of experiences related in particular to the following areas:

In April 2009, an initial seminar was held in Tours:

In July, a second meeting was held in Turin

The following case studies were selected and presented:

4.1. Points requiring particular attention: the three intervention targets

“Crisis” dynamics and the social/economic impact

Crises can hit production organisations and their consequences have a clearly negative impact on people, but the opposite is also true: personal “crises” (insecurity, lack of prospects for stability, …) can also have very serious consequences for organisations, particularly smaller ones.

Whether they arise from organisational factors (economic, social, organisational……) or personal factors, crises can be difficult to predict, but because of the negative effects they can often have on a human level, as well as a social and economic level, it is important to try to establish observation and clarification mechanisms that allow them to be anticipated as much as possible.

These ancitipation mechanisms also require relationship barriers to be removed and channels of communication to be opened/strengthened between organisations and people, who often fail to perceive crises or their nature in sufficient time to deal with them and reduce their mostly negative impacts.

In this context, there is a clear need to implement professional devices that help people and companies, and this is the area to which the project intended to contribute.

Individuals

In an era characterised by global competition and mobility of resources (not only economic), the quality of “human resources” plays a fundamental role in the socio-economic development of all systems, whatever their size.

Improving the level of training by reducing gaps (both national and international) has now become an unavoidable objective for all the world’s economies and particularly for the countries of the European Union, which set themselves the objective, with the Lisbon strategy (2000), of turning Europe into “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, able to achieve sustainable economic growth with new and better jobs and greater social cohesion”.

The problem of training, which is closely correlated with the problem of access to “knowledge”, affects the quality of the human capital on which the development of individual systems is based.

If access to a level of training that provides evident benefits (social mobility, higher levels of pay, easier access to higher skilled jobs or job retention) is made difficult for a certain group of people (particularly of a lower socio-economic level), problems of fairness are created and social cohesion is put at risk.

The current transitory and unstable nature of employment contracts has endangered the traditional models that people are accustomed to, making it extremely difficult to accumulate transferable and organisable experiences and skills into a career prospect. In this context, work is destined to become increasingly more difficult to access and retain in the absence of adequate skills for taking part in the production processes.

In particular, non-highly skilled positions (groups that are at particular risk of exclusion) now require far greater knowledge than in the past, as well as a set of behavioural skills associated with communication, proactive commitment to achieving results, team work and problem solving.

Continuous training occupies an increasingly important position in this context, for both companies and individuals.

This also means that there are new challenges for European vocational training bodies.

Vocational training is affected in different ways in individual European countries by the decentralisation processes that accompany increasing integration with social cohesion policies and active labour market policies.

For this reason, training bodies are required not only to refine the content and delivery of their vocational training services but also to develop both new forms of interaction with active labour market and local development policies as well as existing services (guidance, advice, mediation, adult education and development of crossover skills) that accompany and support mobility and both the professional and social development of people.

It is also important to consider the legal status of individuals who find themselves (against their will) in company crisis or restructuring situations. This varies from country to country depending on laws and the type of actions and devices, which is why a common legal definition/position is needed for all workers (particularly where the ESF is used to organise actions) that establishes entitlements and duties in addition to technical and financial responses in order to give these workers a consistent social dignity and visibility, even in temporary situations of unemployment.

Companies

Human resource development programmes conducted in a production crisis situation, even if they are intended to support innovation and to relaunch production, should not be economically linked to the specific emergency and exclusively concerned with the workers at risk during the emergency.

They should be viewed as an organic part of development and innovation plans in the sector, in terms of continuous training and lifelong learning, and involve all the human resources and strategic organisation of the companies themselves.

A lack of adequate investment in human resources and a lack of attention to training by companies can be considered to be among the components of the causes that originate crises.

For this reason, while prompt and timely action definitely needs to be taken to deal with emergencies, even by providing training, it is also necessary to turn these situations into opportunities, in order to contribute to the development of a new innovation strategy that includes continuous training as a stable and permanent component.

With this in mind, the action to be taken when a crisis situation is detected could be targeted not only at the individual workers at risk but also at the companies themselves, helping them to launch an innovation process that turns them, among other things, into centres of continuous training and investment in the skills of workers.

The overall strategic logic required is definitely not to intervene in a standardised bureaucratic way but to build, in an integrated, patient and intelligent way, a mosaic of connections, resources, opportunities, tools, requirements, interests and projects relating to people, territories, companies, services and institutions.

The need for companies to see training as a resource

The local area

Considering the context, the development and competitiveness of companies undoubtedly depend on the internal dynamics of the sector to which they belong, but also (to an increasingly important extent) on the macro-environment in which they exist.

The efficiency of public administration, the transport system, the energy supply and telecommunication networks, training, etc., define the macro-environment and therefore the “basic” competitiveness of local areas and companies.

In crisis situations, these elements are levers that can be used and strengthened in order to trigger home-grown economic and employment development processes.

The context in which policies and the respective interventions must therefore develop is the local labour market, and relationship-building is the tool that can be used to implement these policies, by applying the networking principle to achieve participation and integration.

As a result of this, local areas will become more than a simple physical space and container, turning into networks of people and entities/players acting together and interweaving their paths.

Interventions must aim:

Making the most of local specificities strengthens the role that each local area can play, creating original solutions and identifying “local know-how” as an opportunity to acquire a specific role within the global system.

4.2 Key points: more anticipatory, partnership-centred and individualised policies

Further to the above, we believe it is now essential for all actions (of whatever form or nature) to take place with respect for the principle and criteria of personalisation, which means that attention has to be focused as a priority on the individual, so that a series of different high quality services can be quickly provided that are arranged in unitary paths and aimed at improving the individual’s position in the labour market.

4.2.1.. Intervention objectives

Support for people by providing paths to greater mobility, professional development, re-employment and reintegration

Some form of support should be provided for all workers involved in crisis situations. This includes support with developing a personal career path, involving the identification and certification of skills, professional and training guidance, personal empowerment, counselling, outplacement, tutoring and mentoring during the process of integration into a new place of work. The task generally involves devising personalised professional reintegration paths with the people concerned, providing all the advice and tutoring required along these paths and connecting them with all the available welfare support systems, all the different kinds of employment and mobility support and incentives, ensuring that the ultimate aim of all the measures taken is not simply to provide support but to be productive in social and employment terms. This initial intervention is not only a stand-alone action. It also encompasses all the actions targeted at redundant and at-risk workers described in the subsequent stages of intervention.

Training for reskilling, specialisation and professional updating

This is understood to be a range of training opportunities to be integrated in a targeted way with the development paths mentioned in the previous point and to be provided in dedicated training establishments and/or within the company; in any case with a close connection to the workplace at least in terms of internship. It is essential for this training to be very targeted and intensive, and therefore short and diverse in terms of the method of provision, reflecting the requirements and potential outlets. It might be useful to provide not only group courses but also personalised forms of training with tools such as employment/training grants and vouchers. Making this part of an ongoing training process also requires modular and transparent methods to be adopted that can capitalise on the skills acquired to launch personal lifelong learning processes.

Psycho-social support to people experiencing particular personal difficulties and to their families and social context

The human costs of this crisis will be very high and create personal and social difficulties. This means that individual and group psycho-social support must be provided in an organic way, preventing a worsening of difficulties encountered. In addition to dealing with the difficulties themselves, this service must facilitate the work of local social and healthcare workers. A number of workers may also presumably need to be provided with a welfare assistance and advice service for people who, because of their social security situation, age or health, could or should consider the possibility of withdrawing from the labour market or who in any case require specific attention, particularly owing to disability or occupational rehabilitation requirements.

Support for forms of self-employment and the potential for joining existing associations or cooperative entities. This requires targeted advice that takes into account the person’s previous experience and synergies with the series of structural measures implemented to respond to the crisis.

Projects providing targeted training and advice in companies, particularly SMEs, for the purpose of innovating technologies, organisation, processes, products and market relations, in order to maintain employment. What is proposed is essentially an investment in all the company’s human resources which also includes structural reorganisation and improvement. Apart from the immediate result of protecting jobs, it is important not to underestimate the added value of developing training within the company, which is the place and system in which knowledge is developed. Bringing training together with support measures will once again guarantee that the outcome is productive and not limited to providing support.

Taking charge of workers hit by the crisis and working with them to ensure their redeployment, by implementing diverse and organic procedures, requires the active involvement of a range entities with different functions and responsibilities to deliver the various kinds of services that could be organised in a local programme network.

Strengthening/Supplementing the action of employment services, particularly with a view to integrating them into a local programme network and to developing the synergy between training, consultancy and tutorial measures to be implemented and the institutional action of the services.

Creating a local programme network is essential for ensuring the effectiveness of interventions. In order to gain a clearer and more concrete picture of the needs and opportunities for intervention briefly set out above, 3 preliminary conditions need to be fulfilled:

           The training system must be one that initially identifies innovative services and methods that are equipped with equally innovative tools and with the new skills required by “operators” to make the “policies” a reality, use the tools and deliver the services.

4.2.2. The intervention status:

4.2.3. Operators and their skills

Situations differ from one region to another. These differences are the result of the way in which operators are historically structured but also of the consensus arising from past experiences (what worked and what didn’t work) and the urgent needs identified by the existing operators.

Finally they depend strongly on the level at which decisions are taken to launch operations.

In some cases, the national level has had a strong influence on bringing existing organisations together, without however causing any fundamental change in their institutional nature and their funding or intervention methods. This approach could therefore be defined as a rationalisation of public intervention that seeks to improve the operational effectiveness of the whole. The most significant example is the case of the Netherlands.

At the opposite end of the spectrum one could mention the example of Turin, where the development agency has tried to create a business support mechanism. The public employment service is given a new role here in the context of a specific proactive policy.

(Role of the SPE (approaching companies, a proactive dimension). This is another dimension of active employment policy.

Between these two extremes there is a series of initiatives that rely to a greater or lesser extent on one or more existing operators, trying to create a more dynamic partnership around them and to develop new tools to govern the mechanism and establish its intervention methods.

Obstacles: managing situations outside the conflictual context created by the crisis (“From weakness to crisis”), already experienced with VDAB or other cases of massive restructuring (interplay between employers and trade unions on the visibility and management of temporalities).

The skills of operators

The complex architecture of vocational training and employment policy management in crisis situations will require a considerable effort to be made to achieve the ambitious objectives of integrating systems which are in themselves highly complex and have their own specific problems.

This will inevitably mean that the operators of all the different institutions, and generally all the stakeholders involved, must be able to implement management methods that suit the system as a whole, adopting a rationale that is completely different from the one they are used to.

This is not a process that can be completed overnight, it requires widespread awareness of the need to implement forms of collaboration and dialogue that achieve results which cannot be achieved with the traditional approach, with regard to specific sectors and with regard to building an active and European citizenship.

This awareness must exist both in the political system in the strictest sense and in the administrative and private arenas, based on the premise that everyone has to play a part in devising new policies and, undoubtedly, that measures will need to be taken over time to set up both learning and instrumental partnerships.

In fact, in order to achieve the established objectives, system operators not only need motivation and “political” responsibility to be taken, they also and above all need a range of capabilities, a series of cross-over skills aimed at achieving the complex but desirable integrated management processes.

The pressure to implement change must come not only from the system but perhaps above all from the decentralised entities, both to achieve specific objectives and to manage the system on a day-to-day basis.

Particular focus has to be put on supporting the abilities of the various technical services to play a part in shaping policies, systematically strengthening and adapting their professional skills.

Based on previous experience and existing practice and on what we imagine might be required based on our knowledge of active employment and training policies, we can however identify a number of areas which we believe will have to be developed for future implementation.

4.3. Final product: the Catalogue

The creation of the “catalogue” of available experiences, services and tools is a fundamental step from identifying needs to delivering the solutions.

The catalogue (even at the current experimental stage) has allowed good practices to be identified and compared, going beyond a simple description of the practices and therefore allowing comparisons to be drawn between the participants, actions and tools used to provide specific services.

The descriptions of practices highlight the project context to which they refer, the target population, the problems which they intends to contribute to resolving as well as their objectives, resources and project partnerships.

The seminars agreed that the purpose of the catalogue is also to provide a forum in which policy-makers can discuss and exchange methods and tools with which to organise, manage, coordinate and monitor integrated projects that allow different service providers to be networked.

Based on a catalogue constructed in this way, projects (and therefore tools, services, professional skills) are considered innovative if they are partly or entirely new, different, original compared to the ones already implemented.

The catalogue is therefore an open and expandable repository of services, tools and skills.

It is an open repository because new tools can be added to it and/or suggestions can be made to improve and update existing ones. It is expandable because it is constantly enriched with the new services and tools resulting from a diversity of different experiences.

Innovations can only be included in the catalogue, in order to enrich it, if their originality compared to the existing contents of the catalogue has been verified.

On this basis it will of course be possible to add references to the results of actions taken. Innovation has to be recognised on an ex post basis if applying the service and tool have resulted in improvements to the conditions of people and/or have provided support to companies.

The sustainability of these results, i.e. their reproduceability even after the completion of projects that generated them, has to be discussed.

The training system must be one that initially identifies innovative services and methods that are equipped with equally innovative tools and with the new skills required by “operators” to make the “policies” a reality, use the tools and deliver the service.

In order to ensure that the best practice developed can effectively and fruitfully satisfy the requirements of the relevant systems (labour policies, training, development,..) a shared process had to be developed that promoted the identifiability, in terms of good practice, of the experiments carried out and their formalisation, so that they can be used by a wide range of players operating in the field of policy-making.

In this respect, the main interest of EVTA, through its management of the catalogue on the Portal, lies in promoting mainstreaming, highlighting service activities, selecting the ones that are considered to be most innovative, increasing the visibility and usability of the specific operating tools that these activities require, as well as the processes that connect the various “service” activities in a consistent project-based way.

5. RECOMMENDATIONS:

Recommendation for the creation of a device that will help all actors in the policy-making system to learn from their widespread practices

Should we aim to create a device that is modelled and formalised based on specific excellence criteria? The actual situations are extremely diverse from one area to another, one legislative context to another, one fabric or company to another, etc.. Furthermore, there are major differences between the actors themselves in terms of their nature and their opportunities to intervene.

We therefore believe that we should refrain from excessive formalisation.

"Good" intervention is a specific response to a specific situation deployed in a given context. The nature of this intervention will therefore depend on the actors and the nature of the context in terms of its legal, institutional, methodological and other parameters.

We therefore feel it would be preferable not to aim to establish a single device, but to identify elements that may contribute to constituting such a device, assessing their relevance to the situations observed.

The system of local employment policy actors organising personalised projects to help people and companies find or improve employment has to learn lessons by understanding, examining and comparing practices.

Practices vary because there is a variety of different legislative contexts, but also because the local employment markets in which they are implemented are different and their characteristics are very variable in terms of the employability and independence of people and the requirements of individual companies (size, production processes, markets, …).

It is fundamentally important for intelligent and adaptive services to improve their operational skills by systematically interpreting the results of their individual and collective experiences in an organised way. This is why it is so important for the system to monitor and assess the results based on an efficient IT system.

A comparison of the results achieved by these practices cannot achieve its full potential unless appropriate information is gathered on the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of their individual structure, considering their variability in terms of target, opportunities, resources, operating method of services (their structure, techniques and tools, professional skills, timings and costs).

Specific attention must therefore be paid to correctly identifying service practices.

By practices we mean the series of operations that identify the organisation and implementation of a uniform project aimed at helping a recipient or group (individual or company).

The importance of identifying practices has been increasingly recognised in recent years, both at the bottom and at the top of the policy-making system. Experience provides critical hints and suggestions on how to improve this approach further.

What can we expect from our knowledge of practices?

The policy implementers are professional service organisations that put together projects to assist people and companies, or rather who help people and companies build and implement personal projects, and their modus operandi involves an ability to work on a project-by-project basis.

This ability has to be founded on interpreting the request for help and the profile of each job-seeker by holding direct discussions with the individual. The plan for pursuing an employment objective is built by interacting with the individual and supporting his active search for employment. The aim is to combine the individual’s resources with those which the service can provide, in order to improve his employability, reduce/combat the social restrictions on his independence and help him fulfil the requirements of companies.

Project personalisation requires the use of professional resources, which must be identified and applied in a way that responds as specifically as possible to the particular requirements of the individual.

Personalisation versus mechanical, abstract and impersonal devices and Activation versus passive action.

A widespread network of local services requires a system in which responses are not pre-ordained and mechanically defined in advance from above, but which have an independent ability to plan and respond.

In the current situation, new policies have led to the organisation of a multiplicity of different actions which have tried to deal with a range of divers issues in terms of target, geographical area and availability of resources. Over the past 15 years, national and Community programmes have supported this kind of intervention.

As a result of these programmes, descriptive data sheets or abstracts have been drawn up to describe the so-called “best practices”.

The prevailing message conveyed by this collection of data relates to the importance of the system’s ability to learn by ensuring that the data is assimilated by actors who were not directly involved in the respective activities.

This perception seems to be a fundamental requirement of an active employment and training policy system.

However, a number of requirements emerge from a comparison of these experiences:

For the system to learn, the operators have to be able to see, use or simulate the actual use of professional tools, or at least of the tools that were used to implement public policies using public resources.

This logic of a general device that allows lessons to be learnt from experiences, some or all of the tools to be used, and the structure of the tools to be “copied” to other areas and applied to similar target populations, is fundamental for ensuring effective mainstreaming.

Inspired by this logic, we recommend building a single directory of policy practice, building on the experience of the catalogue created by the Piedmont Region (see the specific data sheet), which was discussed by the Going Local project partners.

Because of its intrinsic features, this “shared” device provides for a much more open and wider “bottom up” participation. Its constituent rules are highly adaptive and require a system of governance based on a common lexicon.

Governance of the system in the strict sense must ensure consistency between the proposed contents and the categories identified in the common lexicon.

This consistency is a relative requirement because the adaptive nature of the device will allow new additions to be made to the categories already contained in the lexicon.

Specific references must continue to be made to the characteristics of the target audiences, to the tools actually used, to the professional skills of operators, to the results of action taken to perform consistency checks, in order to ensure that experiences are included in the catalogue according to a non-nominalistic approach and to make this device a powerful and highly pragmatic policy improvement tool.