Because Employment Is Everyone's Business
Employment-Tunisia - The Minister of Employment and Vocational Training speaks the truth. Bravo! Everyone will benefit, including unemployed youth who have waited too long and Tunisia which has lost too much time. Yes, Tunisia has lost a lot of time dodging real problems, avoiding realistic analyses and therefore silencing those capable of doing so. Everything was supposed to be going well in the best of all possible worlds. Tunisia and its free men almost collapsed under the oppression of mediocrity which reigned supreme over everything. The employment problem, difficult in itself, did not escape the rule. It has hardly ever been treated with the necessary rigor. The Minister's approach is promising. Let's wish him courage and luck.
Because employment is everyone's business, I would like, for all useful purposes, to present some ideas.
It is true that the Ministry's resources are very modest! However, the employment office agents under the Ministry should constitute a real striking force against unemployment.
They are supposed to know the companies in their respective regions, one by one. They are supposed to receive, advise and guide job seekers as best as possible, etc.
A gigantic task, and to the impossible, nobody is obliged! Strengthening staff therefore seems inevitable and urgent.
The Amal project is a good thing. But, to break with the past, the 50,000 young people will not only be lists of individuals, but well-informed, well-documented files.
These young people must be supported and monitored, particularly during training and/or internships. It would be useful to create a mentoring system in companies where job seekers are admitted for internships.
The system, whose objective is to improve the efficiency of internships, would work as follows.
Each internship offered by a company must be the subject of a form specifying its geographical and hierarchical locations, objectives and tasks to be accomplished. The mentor is a manager of the company (who is not necessarily the internship supervisor) who dedicates part of his time to supervising the intern, to following him, to identifying the difficulties he encounters to fully benefit from his internship and to proposing solutions to remedy them (specific visit, documentation, training, ...).
In liaison with the employment office, the solutions are validated and executed. The mentor's intervention costs are reimbursed to the company on the Vocational Training Tax (TFP). Very early on, if the mentor finds that the intern has no chance of acquiring real professional experience in this company and, a fortiori, of being recruited there, he informs him as well as the Employment Office and, together, they adopt a solution that suits the job seeker (change of internship content, change of company, additional training, adaptation training, ...).
For internships in public companies where recruitment is regulated, the intern should be able to benefit from a bonus based on an internship report presented to a commission where the Employment Office is represented. The same system should be applied to the 10,000 higher education graduates who will be prepared to join the public service in 2012: mentoring, internship form, monitoring and support, internship report, etc. But, it must be said, the structures of Tunisia's economy today, all other things being equal, cannot generate enough jobs to absorb the number of job seekers.
The solution, if there is one, is self-employment and micro-enterprises. I am developing this aspect based on the results of a survey conducted by Aneti, BTS with the assistance of the World Bank. The yield of SIVP internships is 30% while the average survival rate of created micro-enterprises is 60%. In addition, a SIVP internship at best creates one job, while a company creates an average of 1.3 jobs. Creating companies is therefore profitable. So what's the problem? There are actually two. The first is sociological and cultural. Society values liberal professions (doctor, lawyer, ...) and jobs in the public sector more than those in the private sector (although the situation is evolving in the right direction) and even less self-employment and micro-enterprises. Their social visibility is not obvious.
The solution? It had already been developed in 1998, during the National Conference on Employment. Society must take charge of the process of rehabilitating small trades and any work that can generate a source of income: valorization from primary school, deepening reflection in secondary school, valorization by men of letters, of "success stories" and of the idea "small project will become big", highlighting by the media the importance of autonomy generated even by a small business, etc.
In fact, everything must be done to ensure that our farmers, as well as our executives, accept the idea that their children set up on their own. Now, how can a salaried job seeker be led to consider the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur? This is difficult, but possible. We must speak to them in the language of truth. Often, that's enough. I had confirmation of this recently when discussing with job seekers in Kasserine. They seem to be receptive. They will organize themselves into an association to channel aid and coaching.
The second problem is the idea of a project. Getting a young job seeker to consider entrepreneurship and asking him to find a project idea is extremely difficult. But the idea can naturally stem from an appropriate internship in a conducive environment. I think the State can create a "locomotive" to pull entrepreneurship. An example will be developed in a future article. It is based on the reorientation of public procurement, the creation of a public procurement center and the reorganization of the maintenance sector. To conclude this aspect, I would like to emphasize the importance of spin-offs as an inexhaustible source of ideas.
It seems to me that it can contribute significantly to solving the employment problem. I believe that possibilities for creating small businesses by public companies exist. Let's bet on civic action (even for non-Tunisian bosses): let's ask each private or public company to spin off another one! Let's ask it to entrust a member of its staff (technician, engineer, or other) with the creation of a small business, of which it would be a client, and to recruit a young graduate as a replacement.
In any case, to further encourage spin-offs and for greater efficiency, it is proposed to entrust its management to the Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training and to dedicate a specialized service to ensure its relaunch and monitoring through regular visits to companies. In addition, this service could directly take charge of the project ideas of company executives when management is deficient. Finally, it would ensure the monitoring and coaching of spun-off units for a period of up to five years. Also to reduce the number of unsatisfied job applications, it is necessary to launch job-creating projects.
The motorway project is strategic. But, a structuring project for the central and southern regions would be needed. I propose to exploit the project of connecting Maghreb railways for this purpose. Let's imagine a high-speed railway line crossing Tunisia from south to north, passing as close as possible to the Algerian border and across the backbone. Let's imagine a tourist resort in the heights of Chaambi accessible by cable car. Let's imagine a snowy winter in the north. You go from a warm climate in the south to snow in a very short time.
You admire wonderful landscapes. You can visit the Chaambi National Park, breathe the mountain air, visit the archaeological sites (Sbeitla, Kasserine, Haidra ...). Isn't there enough to revolutionize the economy of the whole country? The farmers of the Center West will have easy access to the coastal markets and, why not, to the Algerian market. To make this dream a reality, a political decision is needed. Indeed, if the specifications of the feasibility study of the project do not specify that the route must pass through the cities of Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, or at least near these cities, the route will inevitably pass through the Sahel because crossing the backbone is expensive.
However, all these efforts may prove insufficient if we do not address the flows. It is a question of simply stopping the "production" of graduates with low employability. The principle is to make the training institution totally responsible for its production.
Aneti should already review the information published for each job seeker: it is necessary to add the training institution. Today, it contributes to protecting incompetent institutions. Each institution must put in place a system for monitoring its graduates, allowing in addition to collecting "feedback" relating to its training. The Ministry of Higher Education must also adopt an objective evaluation system based on the employment rate of graduates from each institution.
Posted on March 21, 2011
