Nyheter

Public Employment Services analyse their role in tackling the impact of population ageing in European labour markets

06/07/2012

Bundesagentur für Arbeit, the Public Employment Service (PES) of Germany, hosted a Peer Review on Public Employment Services and Older Workers on May 10-11 in Nuremberg.

Representatives from the PES in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK attended and analysed some key questions related to their role tackling the impact of population ageing in European labour markets and social protection systems.

During the last decade PES increasingly have to cope with a new challenge: to provide effective employment assistance to jobseekers close to pensionable age. In some countries they are also expected to guide employers and older employees towards age-sensitive human resource management.

Some of the key questions analysed during the Peer Review were:

• The types of awareness-raising measures which are effective in combating negative perceptions and stereotypes and increasing the recruitment and retention of older workers
• The role that preventative PES services and measures can play in retaining older workers in the labour market
• How PES services and measures can be effective in activating and placing unemployed older workers, particularly those with low or out-dated skills and qualifications.

A thematic toolkit bringing together information from the PES, examples of good practices and a summary of the Nuremberg seminar is available here.

The review is part of PES to PES Dialogue, the European Commission’s mutual learning support programme for public employment services.