Industry perspective
Uganda and East Africa, in general, is currently struggling to overcome high levels of unemployment, some employers in some sectors are reporting skill shortages. Shortages, unemployment and skill mismatch have negative financial and non-monetary consequences for employers, individuals, and society as a whole. Europe faces a double challenge: to overcome the current economic situation, by creating new jobs to reduce unemployment and social exclusion, but also to develop solutions to reduce skill mismatch on the labour market. While it is acknowledged that tackling skill mismatch cannot, by itself, be a solution to the high rates of (youth) unemployment that Uganda currently faces, it is nonetheless a critical part of the equation in this new term.
Gap between policy and practice.
Most skill mismatch research focuses on methodological issues, the incidence of mismatch and its impact, and not on actual policies and practices addressing it, making it difficult to assess which policy instruments work and which do not.
What the role of education?
What has not been systematically researched is to what extent education, employment and other policies can be combined to address mismatch. Much current action in employment policy focuses on getting people into work. But ensuring a good match between the skills people have and labour market needs is also important to ensure that Uganda makes full use of the skills of its citizens.
Policy learning
Policy learning can be important mechanism in Uganda make the right choices when introducing and implementing new policy instruments targeting skill mismatch. But copy-paste approaches to transferring entire policies or measures are rarely useful, as the national policy context, labour market characteristics, education systems and other national contextual conditions impact on the effectiveness of policy measures.
What is helpful when trying to learn from experience elsewhere is information on specific features or principles of policies and practices that have proven their effectiveness. Such information is hard to come by as policy evaluation is not well developed in Uganda.
What solutions should the government put in place?
1. Refocus active labour market policies on skills matching
There are also several ways to improve the skills of the unemployed: getting workplace experience by making workplace learning part of the training. This should be done by established, implemented and monitored by the Directorate of Industrial Training in the Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development.
Gaining such experience is not only a means for the lower-educated unemployed but may also help the higher-educated. It is becoming clear that it is not always necessary to train in the skills specifically needed in the labour market; training in generic skills may be sufficient, as long as they can be transferred to a wide range of potential occupations or sectors.
Establish new and innovative information and communications technology (ICT) tools which will help the unemployed find a job and promote the matching process. This in itself have the potential to support job seekers and employers.
2. Promote matching through education and training
The main contributions from education and training to combatting skill shortages are guiding students to professions where their skills are needed, reforming qualification standards, and adapting curricula in cooperation with employers (or their representatives). Consistency is required between the labour market (and skill shortages) and the choices made by students. This may be achieved by supporting more direct contact between schools and students on the one hand and the social partners on the other.
This means not only offering the students self-service systems, but also accompanying them with personal counselling to ensure that they can find and use the information they need and to enable informed career choices. At the same time, reducing early school leaving may be linked with skill shortages, for instance by redirecting early school leavers toward training with a favourable labour market perspective.
On the demand side of the labour market, schools should (try to) get direct feedback from the business environment, to adapt the training they provide to the latest skill needs of the local/regional labour market; for that reason, schools have to be part of the relevant networks.
Establish one-stop shop career centres, networking by individual teachers instead of schools and interviews between teachers and students directed at prevention of early school leaving.
3. Target the employed
As important as the training of employees is, it is just as crucial that existing skills are recognised as such (for instance through certification), to prevent unnecessary training. Rather than setting an unrealistic and vague goal of ‘opening up the vocational system’, more direct instruments which offer a flexible way to certify one’s skills and possible directions for further training may be more effective.
Instruments in which a combination of different practices was adopted were considered most innovative. The combination of skills certification and education is a relevant one; other innovative instruments, for instance, combined training with guidance and counselling towards areas of skill shortages.
4. Move to comprehensive skill mismatch strategies
Uganda is slowly, but steadily, developing from a situation with a loose set of skill mismatch policies and instruments towards an overall skill matching strategy in which all stakeholders are involved, sometimes using innovative tools to get them aboard. Some of the strategies are still at the ‘fundamental’ stage: the vocational education and training (VET) system is developing their own policies directed at the unemployed or students, respectively. The key stakeholder such as employers (and employer organisations) should be involved in so far as they have to provide the jobs for the unemployed or students.
Stakeholders should be directly involved from a skill-matching perspective. The next stage is that of countrywide skill mismatch strategies, which deal with all aspects of skill mismatch policies: identification of skill mismatches, upskilling the unemployed, increasing the responsiveness of the education system to skill mismatch problems and training workers. We need to incorporate innovative ways to stimulate cooperation between stakeholders, for example when letting the social partners decide which skills are needed in the future or when removing the administrative burden from employers through ICT support.
In the next article, we shall look at the following
- Is our mindset a cause of unemployment?
- How do we break the scripted life?