Governments and public employment services, such as Adem in Luxembourg, need to constantly innovate to find new ways to reduce the “skills gap”. They have to amplify their efforts in matching the increasing demand on the job market with the scarce supply of the right skills, as well as provide appropriate financial support in the context of existing and emerging policy schemes.
On one hand, employers need to ensure that their businesses remain competitive and that they can follow market trends, thus making sure they have the capabilities and capacities to deliver on client expectations.
On the other hand, jobseekers and the currently employed need to take ownership of their own continuous learning and career development to remain pertinent for tomorrow’s labour market. Some may have to reorient their career due to major changes to their jobs. Young jobseekers need to find their entry to the job market.
In light of the above, we have recently released our strategy “”, which includes, among other things, two strategic objectives that focus on technology and innovation: (1) reach high levels of operational and organisational excellence and agility, and (2) digitalise service offerings and internal processes.
eAdem
We are implementing this strategy by launching a large, holistic digital enablement programme (eAdem). eAdem contains an innovative, customer-centric approach, which will enable Adem to improve its client interactions, and will profoundly transform its ways of working in the coming years. This organisation-wide transformation will be the IT backbone to achieve Adem’s strategic goals. We aim to design, implement, deploy and run an application architecture that will progressively replace our legacy applications in the future. Adem is currently at the final stage of a large public procurement process to purchase such a system.
For Adem, the following aspects are crucial for the future IT solution:
—Quick time to market: as the agency is embedded in a constantly evolving political and legislative environment, it must be able to react to and implement legislative changes very quickly. Hence, the future solution should provide autonomy, flexibility, agility and reactivity for Adem to rapidly customise and develop features of the solution.
—Security: Adem handles sensitive to very sensitive (e.g. health-related) personal data, which requires a robust, safe and reliable IT environment to ensure rigorous compliance.
—Interoperability: Adem is one of many public administrations that delivers services to both citizens and companies: exchange of data at its source (cf. “”) and a seamless digital user experience across e-government services is essential. Thus, the future solution should support interoperability standards.
—User-friendliness: digital maturity varies among Adem agents and external users such as jobseekers and employers. For that reason, it is crucial that the future solution comes with an attractive and user-friendly working environment, allowing our clients to seamlessly interact with us via a self-explanatory client-portal, and Adem counsellors to focus on the quality of the client relationship and the services provided.
—Straight-through processing (STP): In the job market context, we aim to enable STP for job offers for our larger employer clients. We have an easy-to-use application programming interface for direct import for the mandatory declaration of job offers. This makes it much easier for our employer clients to comply with their legal obligations
—Tailor-made for all target groups: The challenge is in balancing the growing demand for digital services geared toward diversified target groups and maintaining value-added human interactions on all levels. Human-centric, multi-channel interactions are a priority.
Self-servicing is key
eAdem will contain a jobseeker and employer-centric informational and transactional portal called MyAdem, which will focus on facilitating employment. Our clients can interact with us in real time, and it will be easy, just like in a web-banking interface. MyAdem assists jobseekers by matching their CVs with existing job offers or, conversely, to find out which, or to what extent, skills may be missing to perfectly match the desired job offer.
MyAdem also suggests open positions to jobseekers based on their current CVs and assists them in defining professional pathways by matching current CVs to tomorrow’s jobs. Remaining skills gaps can then be tackled by Adem’s numerous learning, reskilling and upskilling initiatives that are discussed in advance with the personal Adem counsellor, giving jobseekers an edge to their individual profiles.
MyAdem will also display the status of current and potential future financial aid, integrate a chat function, and offer the ability to file any type of request online.
AI comes in
To achieve these objectives, we aim to implement artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, where appropriate, efficient and ethical. We see a large efficiency gain by AI assisting in day-to-day repetitive administrative tasks, but also in decision support for our counsellors, for example, in the field of profiling and matching. AI can help prepare e-mail replies that a human agent will approve. AI can also chat with clients and advise them on specific topics.
With eAdem, we will have a solution that covers the entire lifecycle of our clients: jobseekers, employers and, at a later stage, employees considering a change in career paths.