Promoting Employment and Employability: Launch of the second phase of the HOMERe project
- While the region is experiencing increasing enrolment rates in tertiary education – expected to reach 40% by 2030 on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, almost a third of employers consider that skills shortages are a constraint to hiring.
- The annual conference of the HOMERe project was held under the theme “Employment and Employability: Adequacy to the Mediterranean Labour Market” as part of the Summit of the Two Shores.
- The conference was the occasion of the launch of the second phase of the HOMERe project: 250 young people will be placed in an international final internship in the Mediterranean by the end of 2020.
Marseille, 21 June2019. The annual conference of the HOMERe project, an internship program approved by the 43 Member States of the Union for the Mediterranean in December 2014, at the Marseille Provence Chamber of Commerce and Industry, brought together a hundred academic, economic and institutional representatives from both shores of the Mediterranean to exchange on innovative practices and formulated concrete recommendations on the themes of “Employment and Employability: Adequacy to the Mediterranean labour market”.
The conclusions of this conference, co-organised by the association HOMERe, the Mediterranean Union of Business Confederations BUSINESSMED, the Euro-Mediterranean Network for Economic Studies EMNES and the University of Bretagne Occidentale, will be transmitted to the French Presidency for the Summit of the Two Shores. The HOMERe consortium participated in May 2019 in the preparatory forums of La Vallette on Education, Youth and Mobility and Palermo on Environment and Sustainable Development.
UfM Deputy Secretary General Miguel Garcia-Herraiz, in his opening remarks, emphasized the complexity of the challenges facing the Mediterranean today and recalled the importance of the multi-stakeholder approach since ongoing and future changes in the Mediterranean labour market will also open new opportunities and opportunities for the region.
The round tables enabled the expression of the specific expectations of the socio-economic world and in particular of SMEs with regard to the employability of young people and their points of view on concrete solutions for improvement, such as the development of apprenticeship, creation of start-up incubators in universities or mentoring.
While the region is experiencing a higher enrolment rate in higher education – it is expected to reach 40% by 2030 on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, almost a third of employers consider that Skill shortage is a constraint to hiring. “Recruitment and talent acquisition are a strategic challenge for the company,” said Eric Lechelard, Alcatel-Lucent Entreprise’s Director of Human Resources France. “The challenge today is to attract talent to sectors in tension where skills and offers are becoming scarce.”
Launch of the second phase of the HOMERe project
The afternoon was the opportunity to announce the start of the second phase of the HOMERe project, which also corresponds to the launch of the legal migration pilot project recently approved by the Directorate General for Migration and Internal Affairs of the European Commission and the International Centre for Migration Policy, which will help 250 young people to be placed in an international final internship in the Mediterranean by the end of 2020.
Since the launch of the first phase of the project, in Marseille in March 2015, the project has already enabled more than 500 students and recent graduates – almost at parity between women and men – to complete a professional internship within the Euro-Mediterranean area to better prepare for an increasingly interconnected labour market.
HOMERe – High opportunity in the Mediterranean for the Executive Recruitment, is a project supported by the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) within the framework of the Med4Jobs initiative. It promotes internships to help young people succeed in the transition to the labour market and create more mobility opportunities for young people across the Mediterranean.
The full program of the day in PDF
10 years of regional cooperation
