Career Development
Using Employment Platform to automate career development
The constant challenge to maintain labor force parity with labor market demands drives Public Employment Services to seek ways to support jobseekers in their skills development. In addition, with the unprecedented demand for experienced counselors to manage the ever-increasing number of jobseekers, Public Employment Services (PES) seek digital solutions to automate these needs.
Each PES requires an upskilling strategy and complementary processes to address the labor force’s developmental needs. We’ve developed My Career Path to address this imbalance with an automated workflow and self-service ability, drastically reducing the need for manual intervention by counselors.
WCC’s Employment Platform is the market-leading product for PES experts working at the forefront of government labor market strategy and delivery. It’s a back-end solution that fully integrates into portals and applications to fully complement the demands made by end-users and employment stakeholders. These include jobseekers, caseworkers, employers, career counselors, and analysts.
WCC’s My Career Path solution includes modules from our Employment Platform working together with the ESCO taxonomy in EP Taxonomy Manager. In addition, EP Gap Analysis and EP Referral modules, which were previously available as APIs, are now integrated into the EP Portals interface to help jobseekers to follow a career path which allows them to view gaps in their profile when compared with a desired occupation, receive referrals to training programs which help to fill gaps in their experience, and follow upskilling programs preparing them for labor market needs.
EP Gap Analysis and Referral
Automating the approach to career development
My Career Path is a strategically relevant feature of the EP Portals application as it provides jobseekers with self-service capabilities, which PES counselors historically fulfilled. The role fulfilled by PES counselors or caseworkers supporting a jobseeker includes activities such as comparing the requirements of a job with jobseekers’ skills, their work experience, career demands of the jobseeker to identify gaps, and counseling jobseekers on upskilling themselves in preparation. Our career development module now automates these activities. Jobseekers can use My Career Path to compare their profiles with a particular occupation or vacancy. The comparison will show them which essential skills and other job requirements the candidate has and does not have; we refer to this as Gap Analysis.
In addition to the gap in skills, other types of gaps are evaluated against each job, using the ESCO taxonomy in EP Taxonomy Manager. These include required education level, languages, location, salary expectation, desired work hours, contract types, and additional requirements such as a driving license and other certificates.
Steer labor force towards skill development
My Career Path is the career development solution within WCC’s EP Portals. Using the self-service features of My Career Path, a PES can start actively steering its labor force through programs such as training jobseekers for specific job types, career development services for graduates in particular fields, and re-skilling longer-term unemployed jobseekers. It can also assist furloughed employees from redundant sectors or provide study advisory services for students entering the labor force.
Re-skilling the workforce by Digital Transformation
My Career Path provides the self-service ability to expedite skills development by digitally transforming the involvement of career advisors. Successful automation of the process involves empowering jobseekers to find suitable training programs which prepare them for occupations the labor market demands. In addition, the process guides jobseekers towards support measures that will help them improve their chances in the labor market. Support measures can be short-term online training, enrollment for PES-sponsored training programs, or professional certifications. This strategy is also very relevant in large organizations that foresee redundancy for employees with specific skill sets and needs to develop their skills to prepare them for future needs.
Within EP Portals, the Referral module presents training options that are classified using the taxonomy available within EP Portals. Labor market experts or training providers can maintain training options using the EP Taxonomy Manager, or the API can update training options automatically.
Our EP Taxonomy Manager centrally maintains all connections between training options, skills, and competencies they provide. As a result, we empower Public Employment Services to support upskilling the skills and competencies of jobseekers and develop jobseekers to prepare them for an occupation that is either already in demand in the employment market or that is expected shortly.
Public Employment Services can invite training providers to develop training programs to meet the demand for skills missing within the generic candidate population, identify obsolete training programs and improve the content based on realistic employment market data on the current market and occupations that are rising in popularity.
Success Stories
VDAB
(Flanders)
VDAB
• In this case, business partners of the Belgian PES, VDAB, wanted to see improvements in the job matching quality.
• WCC competence-based matching strategies, refined monthly, were used to significantly improve the quality.
• As a result, customer satisfaction grew markedly. In fact, partners now give priority to jobseekers offered by VDAB.
AMS
(Austria)
AMS
• The Austrian PES, AMS, wanted to modernize its services for caseworkers, employers, and jobseekers while introducing skill-based matching.
• So WCC Employment Platform modules were tested in a ‘Match Lab’ at AMS.
• AMS gained experience of WCC Employment Platform modules, delivering better services and results, with less manual work, and fewer errors.
Bundesagentur
(Germany)
Bundesagentur
• The two main concerns of the BA were data security/privacy, along with the cost of development, testing and production hardware.
• So WCC provided our ELISE Search & Match Platform to encrypt the data, as well as enable virtualization using Docker containers.
• Data privacy subsequently improved, coupled with lower costs for hardware due to a flexible infrastructure.
VDAB
(Flanders)
VDAB
• In this case, business partners of the Belgian PES, VDAB, wanted to see improvements in the job matching quality.
• WCC competence-based matching strategies, refined monthly, were used to significantly improve the quality.
• As a result, customer satisfaction grew markedly. In fact, partners now give priority to jobseekers offered by VDAB.
AMS
(Austria)
AMS
• The Austrian PES, AMS, wanted to modernize its services for caseworkers, employers, and jobseekers while introducing skill-based matching.
• So WCC Employment Platform modules were tested in a ‘Match Lab’ at AMS.
• AMS gained experience of WCC Employment Platform modules, delivering better services and results, with less manual work, and fewer errors.
VDAB
(Flanders)
VDAB
• In this case, business partners of the Belgian PES, VDAB, wanted to see improvements in the job matching quality.
• WCC competence-based matching strategies, refined monthly, were used to significantly improve the quality.
• As a result, customer satisfaction grew markedly. In fact, partners now give priority to jobseekers offered by VDAB.
AMS
(Austria)
AMS
• The Austrian PES, AMS, wanted to modernize its services for caseworkers, employers, and jobseekers while introducing skill-based matching.
• So WCC Employment Platform modules were tested in a ‘Match Lab’ at AMS.
• AMS gained experience of WCC Employment Platform modules, delivering better services and results, with less manual work, and fewer errors.
Bundesagentur
(Germany)
Bundesagentur
• The two main concerns of the BA were data security/privacy, along with the cost of development, testing and production hardware.
• So WCC provided our ELISE Search & Match Platform to encrypt the data, as well as enable virtualization using Docker containers.
• Data privacy subsequently improved, coupled with lower costs for hardware due to a flexible infrastructure.