CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

3.5.1 Growingneeds

A significant literature argues that important economic and social benefits flow from the ready availability of high-quality career guidance and job-placement services in advanced societies (e.g., Campbell et al., 2010; CPBA, 2009; OECD, 2003, 2004). The principal arguments include:

s Good career guidance can increase participation in education, improve course

completion rates and better articulate societal demand for learning. This means more individuals realise more of their potential, fewer educational resources are wasted, and the relevance of education to social and economic needs is continually assessed;

s Career guidance and job-placement services make distinct yet interrelated

contributions to improving the match between labour market supply and demand. They can help job matches last longer, improve labour productivity, lower frictional unemployment and contribute to anticipating skills shortages in the future;

s The identification of the education, training and jobs best suited to use and

develop each person’s potential at different moments in the individual’s lifespan, and not just when first leaving the formal educational system, raises a country’s human capital, strengthens individuals’ lifetime employability and promotes lifelong learning. Quality career guidance, in addition, fosters the acquisition of key career-management skills;

s Job-placement and career guidance services can make specific and strong

contributions to the attainment of important equity goals. They can ensure a smoother transition from school to working life, improve the effectiveness of active labour market policies and, generally, help provide a more level playing field for individuals from socially disadvantaged or minority ethnic backgrounds as they seek jobs and educational/ training opportunities.64

64 Layard et al. (2005) emphasise that a key role of a modernised Public Employment Service is its capacity to ensure that the harder to employ are not locked out of the ongoing level of job churn and, thus, its ability to ‘interrupt’ long unemployment spells and help prevent people losing all attachment to the labour market.

It is because of these potential benefits that governments across the developed world are proactive in ensuring as universal access as possible to quality career guidance and job-placement services. As national labour markets become more impacted by technological and organisational changes and new trade patterns and migration flows, greater proportions of their populations need and seek expert career guidance and job-placement services. At the same time, the guidance function has become more difficult to perform as the anticipated profile of future jobs and their likely skill requirements change, and a much wider range of programmes, courses and opportunities come onstream to which unemployed job- seekers can be directed. Labour markets and educational and training systems have simply become more complex and demanding places for individuals to navigate on their own as their working lives unfold.

Put simply, in the absence of adequate career advice and guidance, increased complexity leads to a concomitant increase in the likelihood of a substantial proportion of individuals reaching sub-optimal decisions, which in turn lead to a significant level of sub-optimal outcomes (Keep and Brown, cited in Bimrose, 2006: 4)

A quality guidance service, therefore, plays a decisive role in empowering individuals to manage their own career paths in a more secure way (Campbell et al. 2010). For this reason, policy makers in a number of states (including Ireland) identify career guidance as an integral element of their strategies for lifelong learning (European Council, 2008; OECD, 2004). Not all this career guidance, of course, needs to be publicly subsidised, let alone publicly provided. Higher living standards, higher educational levels, greater cultural and institutional recognition of individual choice and, latterly, widespread broadband access to the internet, mean there are greatly increased opportunities for self-help and that the private sector has hugely expanded its roles in job placement and career guidance. The OECD, nevertheless, conclude that the societal benefits to be reaped from such services are so significant that government must be vigilant in ensuring high levels of usage, particularly by people experiencing particular labour market disadvantages (op. cit.).

3.5.2 Theinterrelatedfunctionsofpublicemploymentservices

Public employment services, adequate to the challenges and needs of a knowledge economy and learning society, typically perform a number of key interrelated functions, both directly and indirectly by linking with other public, private and community organisations.

s It should provide a suite of standard job-search services – modern self-service

facilities, advice on basic techniques, counselling and career guidance – that assist employment-ready jobseekers in their routine job-searching.

s It should carry out job-matching to the mutual satisfaction of both jobseekers

and employers and, therefore, contribute to higher productivity and more stable employment. Its services in this area should complement and not duplicate those provided by private sector recruitment bodies.

s It should act as a ‘gateway’ to a broad range of education, training and

employment programmes. This function should be informed by quality intelligence on emerging skills needs and the pedagogies, programmes and institutions that best impart them.

support for clients finding it difficult to re-enter employment. This more intensive engagement includes successful profiling and the design and monitoring of effective action plans for disadvantaged jobseekers.

s It should play a leadership role in identifying missing services and helping to

design and stimulate the supply of initiatives that fill these gaps. In part, this involves affording autonomy to other public and private service providers to enable them to generate more tailored and customised services; it also requires a capacity on the part of the PES itself to dialogue with, and learn from, other service providers and clients.

3.5.3 SomelessonsfromreformsofthePublicEmploymentService(PES)in othercountries

Some key lessons can be considered to emerge from the extensive reforms of the PES carried out in other advanced economies.

Contractingoutandincentivecontracts

‘Contracting out’ has been a feature of the reform of the PES in a number of states including the UK, Germany and Denmark, but the process has gone furthest in the Netherlands and Australia, where it has driven the emergence of quasi-markets for the provision of activation services (Lindsay and McQuaid, 2009). An OECD review (Tergeist and Grubb, 2006) of activation strategies and the PES in Germany, the Netherlands and UK, however, found that the evidence was mixed as to whether private provision of employment services had, in fact, led to better outcomes than public provision, a scepticism reinforced by other studies (Finn, 2008). In relation to cost savings, these studies similarly caution that, while contracting out employment services to private contractors can mean some functions are performed more efficiently and effectively, savings need to be considered net of costs arising from the contracting out, i.e., higher transaction and administrative costs on contract design, bid-preparation and assessment, contract management, supervision and revision. Such costs can be particularly high where public bodies have limited experience with contractual arrangements and service agreements. Contracting out can also raise issues in relation to political accountability and inconsistency in service provision. Finally, contracting out must, also, be done in such a way that it does undermine the future capacity of the PES to monitor and lead developments. An unintended consequence of the reforms in both Denmark and the Netherlands was a hollowing out of the PES with a substantial loss of institutional memory in relation to active labour market policies (Lindsay and McQuaid, 2009). For the PES to function as an effective gateway to a broader suite of ALMPs, it needs to continually develop its in-house intelligence about ‘what works and what does not’

(see below).

The experience in other countries with the use of incentive-based contracts as a mechanism for managing the performance of external providers — both from the private and non-for-profit sectors — is also mixed. These contracts typically involve reserving the payment of a significant proportion of contracts until programme participants have successfully secured and retained employment for a period of time; they seek to pay primarily ‘for results’ and out of clear savings on welfare

expenditures. However, such contracts can generate perverse incentives such as ‘parking’, where the harder-to-help clients receive the bare minimum of service, ‘creaming’ in which service providers concentrate their intakes on easier-to-place clients, and an overt focus on short-term outcomes such as placement rates at the expense of longer term measures such as sustainability and quality of employment (Finn, 2008; Kvist et al. 2008; Nunn et al. 2008). Addressing these problems requires not only sophisticated performance metrics but a strong commitment to ongoing evaluation and continuing adaptation and adjustment in the design of contract and service arrangements (Tergeist and Grubb, 2006). Nevertheless, Individual Reintegration Accounts in the Netherlands – by which unemployed job seekers and their appointed employment service officers jointly control personalised budgets to purchase tailored services – seem to constitute a significant example of a funding model for contracting-out that fosters innovation and a responsive client- driven system (Sol et al. 2008). The evidence to date is that they have had a positive impact on job entry and sustainability rates (Lindsay and McQuaid, 2009).

Leadershipbasedonknowing‘whatworks’

To provide high-quality guidance and advice, a PES must be informed by the best available ‘labour market intelligence’ about existing and emerging job opportunities and their associated skills requirements (Campbell et al., 2010). To function as an effective ‘gateway’ to educational, training and employment supports on behalf of individual clients, it must have a thorough understanding of what is on offer and of the effectiveness of specific providers, courses and programmes in procuring the outcomes its clients seek. To ensure individual action plans are successful, the PES must thoroughly understand the operation of the social welfare code and its allied supports. Indeed, there is an opportunity for the PES to play a significant role in increasing the agility of the educational and training systems and the social welfare code and wider welfare state by providing continuous feedback on its clients’ progress or lack of it, and the reasons (Campbell et al. 2010).

Aholisticanddevelopmentalapproachtocareerguidance

It is frequently stressed that contemporary labour market developments require discarding a traditional model or approach to career guidance, which focuses on helping selected groups make immediate decisions at particular points in their lives, in favour of a more holistic and developmental approach, in which the focus is on supporting the acquisition of career self-management skills that improve an individual’s capacity to make and implement appropriate career decisions (Bimrose, 2006; OECD, 2004). This new approach assists clients in achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal development, considered key ‘soft’ competencies that enable individuals to progress in knowledge-intensive labour markets. This type of career guidance requires significant flexibility and innovation in service delivery – in terms of time, location and methods – both to facilitate access across the individual’s life span (and not just when enrolled in an educational institution or on the payroll of a large organisation) and meet the different needs and circumstances of diverse client groupings. Innovation and flexibility are also important in seeking to contain the costs of providing universal access to a high quality public service.

Ideally, improving the quality of the PES’s more universal services (career guidance and counselling, and job-matching), on the one hand, and strengthening its capacity to be proactive and engage more intensively with disadvantaged jobseekers, on the other, would reinforce each other. For example, best-practice job-matching techniques have an application in improving the design of active labour market programmes (Campbell et al., 2010), while the ability of PES advisors and benefit recipients to draw up and implement agreed individual action plans premised on a mutual obligation approach (the core of successful activation) is greater where clients realise that advisors have the honed skills and professionalism in dealing with the ‘real economy’ to design plans that actually work (OECD, 2004). However, it is also clear that finite resources impose choices about when to develop competencies within a PES and how, but the lesson appears to be that the choice must not be reduced to an ‘either...or’ between universal and targeted functions but seek the maximum synergies between them.

InstitutionalCulture

The international research and good practice also warn that the formal merger of employment services and benefits administration at ministerial level and/or their physical co-location do not necessarily result in the seamless, co-ordinated and ultimately improved level of service for unemployed clients that is ultimately sought (Lindsay and Mailand, 2008; COM 2006). Sweeping Danish reforms, for example, brought employment services and benefit administration together but, some years later, research found that differences in approach, which the integration hoped to lessen, had been carried into the new integrated organisation (Lindsay and McQuaid, 2009). Senior PES professionals from a number of EU states have highlighted the importance of developing a shared organisational culture in seeking to realise any added value from the integration of employment services and benefit administration (EU 2006).

PartofaDevelopmentalWelfareStateforIreland

Employment services, accessible to all but on tailored terms, were an integral part of the Developmental Welfare State (DWS) that NESC first sketched in 2005 as necessary if Ireland is to reconcile its ambitions for its society and its economy (NESC, 2005). The DWS emphasises, on the one hand, that a high level of social protection is premised on a high level of employment and, on the other hand, that attaining and maintaining a high level of employment requires extensive and ‘smart’ social protection. Only ‘smart’ social protection will lessen the risk and remove the trauma from changing jobs and experiencing short spells of unemployment. By doing so, it increases acceptance on the part of the national workforce of the need for ongoing workplace and sectoral changes and ensures that job-churn and short bouts of unemployment do not undermine human capital. In this Irish version of flexicurity (NESC 2008; chapter 6), a high quality PES plays a pivotal role in ensuring that periods out of employment are used to best effect by the individuals concerned, including by stimulating improvements in active labour market policies and in education and training provision. In advocating public services that are capable of gradation and adjustment (termed ‘tailored universalism’ in the 2005 report), the DWS provides a good framework within which to balance, without allowing one

to undermine the other, the universal career guidance and job-placement services of a PES with the capacity to refer jobseekers facing particular difficulties to more specialized providers and programmes.

The lens of the Developmental Welfare State, finally, reinforces the need for the PES to move from its current fragmented structure towards a more consciously networked, devolved and multi-layered system. Under its new head department, the DSP, the PES has a new opportunity to develop as the leader and animator of a network across which public funds procure the best possible outcomes for unemployed jobseekers from, variously, public organisations, private bodies and NGOs. This will require having the confidence and required systems in place to cede autonomy in a manner that stimulates enhanced levels of policy innovation and adaptation by specific service providers and individual social partners acting in concert with the national labour market authorities.