Relevance of provision to important local employment sectors and global trends and challenges
The regional labour offices periodically analyse the results of regional and local labour markets, and reflects this in national and regional employment and training programmes. The Get Trained for Growth! programme addresses the training needs of employers who have emerged from the recession and are developing activities in certain sectors flagged as having growth potential and which contribute a significant share of GDP. Employment and retraining programmes take time from the development to the implementation phase. While this is not critical when responding to long-term trends, a slow response can result in programmes being introduced which are already out-of-date and no longer reflect the skills required in emerging sectors. No analysis is carried out to identify the potential impact of global trends on the local labour market and employment programmes.
Labour market forecasting
Skills monitoring and forecasting have focused strongly on the national level due to the limits of available data for regional labour markets. The limited focus on emerging markets and skills needs is partially a consequence of the lack of labour market trend forecasting which is still in its initial stages of development. The National Training Fund -National Observatory of Employment and Training (NTF-NOET), Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute (CERGE-EI) and the Research Institute of Labour and Social Affairs (RILSA) are the most experienced research institutions in this area and their activities constitute a good foundation for a forecasting system. National level results of forecasting activities carried out by the NTF-NOET are presented in a coherent and comprehensible manner online.5
Osti nad Labem has set up an innovative pilot research project which is aimed at adapting the national forecasting model to regional needs and it is the only region where forecasting has been disaggregated to the regional level. Since 2009, the Regional Authority has used regional forecasts provided by the RILSA and has disseminated this information on current and future employment prospects to students choosing their secondary education and career paths. However, the regional forecasts suffer from various drawbacks which is why between 2010 and 2012 the RILSA embarked on a research project aimed at developing a more reliable regional forecasting model for the region and a general regional forecasting methodology for other Czech regions (ReferNet Czech Republic, 2009).
