Regione Piemonte integrated employment system (SISL)

Due to the shift of competences to Regions, Piedmont re-designed the employment public system by implementing SISL, whose objective is the creation of a collaboration network between Employment Service Centres. The aim is to support workers during (re)placement and to offer a prompt reply to the employment needs of the regional enterprises. SISL mainly manages the employability evaluation and the matching of working demand and offer; since 2005 it has achieved the following results: · 6,541 users involvement (712 operators, 840 enterprises, 2,913 consultants, 2,076 citizens) · 725,000 CV managed · 27,000 job offered · 15,000 services · 628,672 placements

Policy Context

The Italian Decree n.469 of 23/12/1997 considerably innovated the regulation framework of the national employment market, regulating the transfer of functions on job placement at regional/local level on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity and the so-called "privatization of placement”. The decentralisation had important repercussions on service organization, characterised in the past by a standard management of the procedures over the whole national territory, and today replaced by a more flexible organization. Moreover, the technological and organization modifications of the world of employment, and the slowing down of employment growth in industrial traditional sectors, underlined the need to set up employment services "calibrated" to the needs of the local economic and productive realities, able to better face the new features of the employment market. The cross referencing of Demand and Offer is an essential factor of the system, both for its social relevance, and for the complexity with whom it is implemented, surely due to the lack of standard mechanisms that would enable the automatic association between the professional profile required by the enterprise and the profile of those looking for employment. The reference employment framework aims at creating a new employment market funded not only on an effective employment service system increasing employment opportunities, but also on flexibility, to adapt the employment organization to the economic mutations and to enlarge the participation to the employment market of subjects that run the risk of social exclusion. SISL operates as an open system aimed at favouring efficiency and transparency of the market, in which citizens, workers, the unemployed, people looking for a job, authorised subjects and employers can meet freely and where services are freely chosen. Finally SISL contributes to the Lisbon goal of sustained economic growth, more and better jobs and greater social cohesion by 2010.

Description of target users and groups

The SISL target groups consists of: 463,000 enterprises, 1,200,000 citizens, 50 associations (industrial unions, hand-craft associations, etc), 100 temporary employment agencies, 100 intermediaries, 150 training agencies ISTAT source, 2004 Number of enterprises based in Piedmont provinces Province N. enterprises ALESSANDRIA 48,345 ASTI 26,384 BIELLA 20,305 CUNEO 75,129 NOVARA 31,839 VERCELLI 17,649 VERBANIO CUSIO OSSOLA 13,973 TORINO 229,533 PIEMONTE 463,157 Infocamere source, April 2007

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The setting up of the SISL was promoted by Regione Piemonte supported by the Provinces that provided a contribution in the definition of the system specifications. The methodology that has been used up to now included: - the observation of the requirements and the identification of the competent thematic area; - the periodic collection of the requirements and their formalization in ad hoc documents to be presented, according to the different themes, for evaluation and approval of the competent analysis groups; - the evaluation of: o the degree of importance of the requirement (ex.: essential, very important, important, rather important, secondary). o the degree of time priority for the implementation of the requirement, usable for incremental releases (high, average, low). These activities have been carried out by analysis groups, consisting of regional officials and representatives of each single province, who act on the basis of thematic macro competences (ex.: cross reference of demand and offer, projects…) and whose task is meeting periodically to evaluate and approve jointly the specific operating needs of the various Provinces. Through the mediating activity of the abovementioned work groups it has been possible to set up a system that complied with the needs of all the Provinces, despite the inevitable methodology and organization specificities. Multi-channel issues: The multiple channels were chosen in particular for the services aimed at citizens and enterprises: - internet (web services) - e-mail - mobile phone The on-line services to cross reference demand and offer, usable via internet, aimed at citizens and enterprises include a Service Point (called Job Service) that makes it possible to define one or more search “profiles”, to: - facilitate and personalise the search of curricula or notices. The user, using the search services, may ask the system to carry out interrogations on the basis of predefined parameters in a specific profile; - inform the user, through a text message or an e-mail message, on the news relating to notices and interesting curricula. Moreover, the service aimed at enterprises to collect hiring communications (or cessation and transformation of working relationships) is issued with two transmissions modes: - registration and on-line data transmission of a single communication; - massive transfer of data as files, that contain more communications, that typically interest all the enterprises or their intermediaries that have their own information system to produce a flow compliant with the required format. In both cases, an e-mail is sent to the user to communicate the outcome of the operation.

Main results, benefits and impacts

In general, the use of the system determined potential resource savings (in terms of time, staff and financial resources) connected: - to the “reuse” of information among the administrations (objective also identified by the National eGovernment Action Plan). The reuse indeed streamlines, and in some instances cancels the constant reiteration of data connected to workers and/or enterprises making it possible, simultaneously, to increase and maintain a shared “information” pool, that can be associated to the worker and/or the enterprise and not to the administrative structure (sharing of personal details, of project courses that have been implemented or to be implemented to support the worker and/or the enterprise, job announces, curricula, administrative files). - to the “standardization and automation” of the compulsory information flows. The inter-exchange infrastructure created makes it possible for the local PAs to relate among themselves (ex: communications among SpI) and with the external system through common mechanisms and flows. Further detailing the single services, an evident advantage of the SISL is connected to the monitoring of the interventions for project courses, to support the subjects identified by the regional ROP. This activity, before the introduction of the system, was carried out with inhomogeneous modes from Province to Province. Such dissimilarity referred both to the universe of the information managed and to the modes in which these were gathered (on paper support or through IT applications). The situation implied a considerable organization effort for the Provinces and the Piedmont Region, which were forced to allocate further resources to collect and homogenize such data to enable territorial and national monitoring. The estimated average time for the manual or IT recovery of the files, including standardization of the structure and of the content is 3 man-months. Presuming an average of 8 hours x 22 (monthly working days) x 3 (months), the savings amounts to some 528 hours per year. Another considerable benefit in terms of savings was determined by the use by citizens and companies of the Demand/Offer Matching Service. It was estimated that, where there were no such services, about 20% of the advertisers would have asked for support to the employees of the counters of the Employment Centres to publish their information. Thus, talking as an example the November 2004 – November 2005 period, in which there were 10,795 advertisers, presuming an average support for every person of 60 minutes, the savings amount to 2,159 hours ((10,795)*0.2 x 60 minutes =2,159 hours). With regard to on line transmission of hiring notifications, the positive repercussion can be calculated as well: the enterprise (user) up to now had to send a paper form for every communication with registered mail to the competent SpI with an average filling time of some 15 minutes (including the time to send the letter at the post office). The average filling time has been now reduced by some 9 minutes (including the sending process) and a further average saving of 3 minutes per file can be estimated, considering that generally every user sends more files together. As for back office, SpI makes it possible to save time when entering data, as the operation is managed automatically by the system: considering only 2006, in which some 350,000 hiring communications were issued and estimating 5 minutes per file to enter data, the system led to save about 29,100 hours/year equivalent a 18.7 man-years (the calculation of man-years is based on 7h15’ per day over 215 working days). Innovation: The innovative nature of the SISL is the gathering in a single system all the information needed to verify the effectiveness of the services issued by the SpI, connecting the workers beneficiaries from the interventions, with those that later on established a working relationship. Moreover, the tracking of the project courses makes it possible to programme more accurately the lines of intervention on the territory, offering the possibility to verify, as against objective data, the effectiveness of the adopted actions. SISL-Projects The term project means a series of actions aimed at: - strengthening the idea of self and the autonomy of the person; - adjusting the basic and transversal competences with reference to the working context; - eventually improving specific professional competences (for example through laboratories and simulations of working situations); - supporting the creation of enterprises through interventions to favour the development of the entrepreneurial spirit with particular reference to the greater dynamis msectors ; - monitoring the start up phase of the new enterprises, eventually offering tutoring or specific consultancy actions. The SISL – Project component makes it possible to: - identify and programme the project courses needed to solve the specific needs of the territory or of the single users catchment basin; - configure the basic structures of the identified project courses, defining the phases in which each one is articulated (specifying compulsory nature, sequentiality, subjects involved, support tools such as questionnaires); - assign the worker or the enterprise to a standard project course, identified on the basis of the specific needs; - customising the course according to the peculiarities of the subject; - implement the single phases of the course; - evaluate the effectiveness of the course; - track the eventual notification of a worker to an enterprise following a specific project course

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

The SISL Borsa Lavoro del Piemonte component was reused by Regione Liguria, in 2005, to implement on its territory the services to cross reference on line employment demand and offer.

Lessons learnt

The collaboration between the different administrations proved to be of the essence for the positive outcome of the project, both from the point of view of the design of the services and from the point of view of their dissemination. When the information services satisfy “important” needs, a considerable increase of users that actually use the service is recorded, most of all among citizens and enterprises, that chose the information channel as a means to relate with the PA.

Scope: Regional (sub-national)