EU Employment Week: A helping hand

Business has an important role to play in helping people learn the right skills to get them back to work, says Patrick de Smedt.

A couple of months ago, I went back to school. I did this for a week, in refugee camps in east Africa, together with executives from several other companies.

We were there at the invitation of the UN refugees agency, UNHCR, to see what our existing public-private sector initiatives are delivering and what more can be done.

The children and their parents shared how they are looking for an opportunity to access workable technology, and to acquire the skills to use it - to get an education now and a job in the future.

This profound motivation is plain to see in Europe, too. In fact, in every community technology center across Europe where Microsoft is a partner in providing IT skills to local people, we hear this message every day.

For although Europe is among the richest of continents, unemployment is one of its greatest challenges.

More than 18 million Europeans, 8.5 per cent of the workforce, are presently unemployed; youth unemployment alone averages 18 per cent and ranges well above 20 per cent in some member states.

And as Europe’s population ages, the full cost of today’s unemployment rises further – today there are four people of working age to support each pensioner, but by 2030 there will be only two workers for each retiree.

Behind every one of these statistics, behind the policy frameworks, and indeed behind the recent demonstrations on the streets of some European cities, are real people who want and need access to skills, opportunity and jobs.

So the shared challenge for policy makers and business communities is to accelerate our partnership efforts to give wider and deeper practical meaning to this year’s Employment Week theme of working together for growth and jobs.

One foundation for this was laid at the 2006 spring European council, where member states committed by the end of 2007 to provide every school-leaver with either a job, apprenticeship, additional training or other employability measure within six months, and within no more than four months by 2010.

 Furthermore, in February, European commission President José Manuel Barroso launched the global adjustment fund – an annual commitment of up to €500m that could benefit up to 50,000 workers.

The EU has an ally and a supporter in Microsoft to help achieve these employability goals. Over the last two years, Microsoft has already reached two million Europeans by providing access to training, content, software and technology opportunities through our Unlimited Potential and Partners in Learning programmes.

Building on these programmes, Microsoft also hopes to achieve a multiplier effect through multistakeholder competence-based partnerships.

Launched in January 2006, the European alliance on skills for employability brings together the eSkills Certification Consortium (eSCC) and several of its members – Cisco, Microsoft, CompTIA, EXIN and the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) Foundation – with FIT, Randstad and State Street Corporation.

The alliance members aim at providing 20 million Europeans by 2010 with access to technology, content, certification and training in computer technology and other skills.

It is targeting in particular those furthest away from the labour market: the unemployed, immigrants, young people with low levels of education as well as workers from traditional industries under pressure from global competition.

In Belgium, for example, partner companies, NGOs, national employment agencies and public authorities are discussing how to provide 90,000 people (15 per cent of the unemployed workforce) with technology access, IT skills training and access to content, certification and other skills, with a focus on women and people from ethnic backgrounds.

New initiatives include the alliance of Interface 3 with ten NGOs to train 5,000 unemployed on digital techniques and the pilot project launched by the Flemish government to integrate immigrants by supplying modern training material to learn Flemish.

Other projects to train individuals with disabilities, elderly people, immigrants and other segments of unemployed people are being rolled out in Austria, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland and the Czech Republic as part of a wider effort across all 25 member states.

And so, in looking forward to this year’s edition of Employment Week, at Microsoft we hope that policymakers and other businesses participating in the discussion will draw inspiration from the alliance and decide to invest more in concrete training initiatives which can deliver real results for the people and businesses of Europe.

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