Tailor-made training programmes

Tailor-made training measures as a form of active labour market policy respond to an identification process that highlights a lack of qualified workforce in a particular economic activity sector, federation or company. Current tailor-made measures for unemployed individuals as an efficient way to tackle unemployment can be characterised by their rather heterogeneous, flexible, multi-faceted and small-scale nature. Because of their flexibility, they can be applied transversely to nearly every economic sector, company or business federation that diagnoses a particular need for more highly skilled workers in the context of company expansion or general economic growth.
In Luxembourg, the background that led to the design of tailored training measures can be traced back to the 1996 Comité de coordination tripartite (Tripartite Coordination Committee) negotiations. They were shaped at a time when Luxembourg’s employment rate was still well below the rate the country has witnessed more recently and when, on a wider scale, the European Union launched its first efforts to bring its national employment policies under a coordinated European umbrella. Luxembourg’s 1998 National Action Plan (PAN), subsequently put into law by the February 12 1998 law on the implementation of the 1998 National Action Plan, also led to the setting up of measures via a range of legislative texts stipulating far-reaching employment policies.1
Due to the interaction of private (i.e. companies, federations, etc.) and governmental agencies or departments dealing with vocational training or employment, tailor-made training measures have required the informal cooperation and strong effort of many actors. Generally speaking, the architecture of tailor-made training measures for unemployed people rests upon the following main pillars: as soon as a lack of skilled workers is identified either by companies, a particular business federation or an economic activity sector, the basic skills required are defined and the Administration pour l’Emploi, the ADEM (National Employment Agency)2 proceeds to a pre-selection of possible candidates from their list of registered jobseekers who are able to commence a work-based, business-orientated training scheme and/or an internship in a company in which the shortage has been pinpointed. Concerning the structure of this discussion paper, a first section provides a more general look at Luxembourg’s labour market situation. It helps to explain the context in which tailor-made measures have evolved and succinctly analyses why they have become an essential and to a large extent successful tool to tackle unemployment and offer new perspectives for hard-to-place unemployed people. In the next section, we explore with the help of recent available data and selected examples the results of the analysed measures as well as the difficulties encountered in implementation. The more recent Tremplin pour l’emploi (Springboard to a job) pilot scheme in Luxembourg’s fast-evolving fund management industry is going to serve as a good case study example of a flexible tailor-made measure designed for hard-to-place unemployed people. An assessment is also made of the potential impact of the economic crisis on the success of such measures.