Senior Labour Market Specialist (International) At SOFRECO

Employment Support Project. Labor Market assessment and development of a VTC strategy

Overall Project objective and scope : 14 monts duration

The Project objective is to improve access to employment of vulnerable people in Azerbaijan. Vulnerable people are defined in accordance on the Law on Employment as beneficiaries of the Targeted State Social Assistance program, IDPs, refugees, women, youth, individuals with disabilities, long-term unemployed, individuals with less than two years until retirement, and former convicts.

The overall goal of this service assignment is to develop necessary tools and capacity-building activities to understand the skills of jobseekers and skills demanded by employers. In this regard, the specific objectives include to undertake:

A comprehensive labor market assessment to detect vacancies, critical occupations, and skills most demanded by employers will be developed and conducted. Additionally the SEA’ capacity will be improved to enable SEA staff to replicate the analysis on their own regularly in the future.

Along with labor market analysis, a VTCs strategy will be developed under this assignment to respond to the needs of the labor market. The VTC strategy will be applied for both the mapped ones (existing ones that in Goychay and Baku under MLSPP) and the new ones to be established along with the expansion in the number of VTCs under MLSPP.

The labor market information derived from the labor market assessment will be used by the consulting company in the development of the VTC strategy paper. Along with the expansion in the number of VTCs, it is also expected to have a capability to respond to the needs of the labor market through a constant adaptation of the training content and the teaching and learning processes.

The VTC strategy will draw on the skills demand assessment and is expected to include the aspects for the development of efficient and effective VTCs:

A statistical profiling tool and skill assessment test/s for jobseekers will be developed and relevant online instruments will be integrated to the SEA MIS system.

A case management system will be developed allowing segmentation of the jobseekers accordingly to tailor SEA’s employment support services to beneficiaries, particularly those who are difficult to serve. This approach will be based on the skill assessment of the individuals. In conjunction with their introduction, SEA staff will receive training on these instruments to be able to adequately identify what kind of support jobseekers with different characteristics will require and what type of ALMP will likely work well for different kinds of jobseekers.

Specific requirements for the Senior Labour Market Specialist position:

• Experienced and qualified labor market analysis specialist, especially specialized in development of VTC modules and at least 10 years of related work in VTC modules development.

General requirements

• Regional experience of the experts or at least experience in similar regions and circumstances will be advantageous. Fluency in English and Azeri in assigned field personnel is an advantage
• Professional experience in analysis of employment and social protection programmes, with particular focus on vulnerable populations
• Experience in labour market analysis and working with large datasets (household or firm surveys)
• Experience in implementation of employment project
• Experience in qualitative assessments with focus on profiling and skills assessment tool
• Experience in Vocational Training and VTC programmes
• Experience in organization of trainings for public officials in employment policies and services for the vulnerable population.