Making Labour Market Work for Young People in Albania


Young women and men in Albania face challenges with employment. ©FDFA

An estimated 34% of Albania's youth are unemployed or underemployed. The main causes of this situation are low labour demand, ineffective job matching services and lack of skills. Youth employment is a priority and the Swiss-supported project “Making Labour Market work for Young People” - RisiAlbania - responds to this issue by promoting entry into the labour market.

 

Country/region Topic Period Budget
Albania
Employment & economic development
Employment creation
SME development
01.07.2012 - 31.10.2017
CHF  5’100’000

Project Highlights

Creating jobs in the private sector

Through better links with the private sector RisiAlbania so far has enabled 67 new jobs created for young people in ICT and job information portals, among which 30 women. Moreover, through better public and private job-matching, more than 1’000 young people found a job - 55% of whom are women.

RisiAlbania together with the Ministry of Economy, Tourism, Trade and Entrepreneurship introduced for the first time the national competition “RisiTuristike” that encourages innovative tourist packages and services. By diversifying the touristic offers in the cities of Berat, Shkodër and Gjirokastër the project expects a higher number of tourists and longer stays.  This in turn could boost employment and income.

Improving job-matching services

RisiAlbania developed a new practical management model and intelligent job matching system for the National Employment Services that was tested successfully in the regional labour office in Durrës. This model will become a standard working system for all regional labour offices in the country.

Besides the public job-matching service, RisiAlbania supported a private job portal where 30’100 jobs were posted and 363 companies registered. Furthermore, the project stimulated four national media to actively produce and disseminate labour market information to young people and their parents. Over 227 innovative shows, programmes and newspaper supplements targeting 700’000 young women and men and their parents are already published and aired. 

Skills development

7’846 young people, among which 56% women, upgraded their labour IT skills thanks to a newly-introduced ICT online education programme called Almooc, which is supported by RisiAlbania. This initiative provides free access to high quality courses in Albanian language on the latest in-demand IT skills for young people. Leading experts in the IT industry teach the courses while curriculum materials come from schools across the USA.

The Faculty of Journalism of Tirana University introduced a new module on “reporting attractively on the labour market” in its curricula. 22 journalists and 15 students of journalism and communications strengthened their skills on labour market reporting.