The new cycle of guidance and personalised support in employment policies

The Spanish labour market continues to show significant structural imbalances: high unemployment rates —overall, youth and long-term— represent a fundamental challenge. This challenge is more acute in autonomous communities with high unemployment and low labour force participation. In addition, certain groups (such as people with lower qualifications, migrants or people with disabilities) face greater barriers to accessing and keeping quality jobs, placing them even further away from the labour market.

Active labour market policies are effective tools for reducing unemployment, improving job quality and bringing the population in general, and these groups in particular, into work. However, particularly with the latter, their success usually requires personalised approaches that take into account the specific characteristics and circumstances of jobseekers.

In this respect, personalised guidance and support emerge as key instruments for improving employability and job retention. The literature shows that career guidance and job-search assistance services tend to have a substantial impact at relatively moderate cost. Nonetheless, the evidence also shows that not all guidance and support programmes are equally effective, and that their design and implementation are a fundamental part of this effectiveness.

This document therefore identifies the elements of these policies that make them best suited to achieving their activation and job placement goals:

• Flexibility and individualisation: programmes must adapt to the specific needs of different people, adjusting interventions and methodologies.
• Knowledge of target groups: a thorough understanding of target groups, their problems and contexts is required, as well as of best practices for addressing their employment difficulties.
• Comprehensive approach: holistic approaches combining guidance, training and continuous follow-up prove more effective, especially with vulnerable groups.
• Collaborative models: opening public-private collaboration to a broader ecosystem of providers could both optimise the use of public resources and increase the impact of interventions.

• Cooperation and dissemination of good practices: creating learning networks and fostering the transfer of successful initiatives is a proven tool for shared learning and continuous improvement.

According to AIReF’s Spending Review, the share of the budget allocated in Spain to this type of programme is much lower than that of other policies such as hiring incentives or training, so there is ample room for manoeuvre in our country to better meet the needs of workers and the productive fabric.

In this context, public-private collaboration emerges, especially since the entry into force of the 2023 Employment Act, as one of the levers with the potential to take this guidance to a more efficient level, better adapted to the Spanish reality.

To contribute to this improvement process, this document carries out a comparative learning exercise by mapping public-private collaboration experiences in guidance and support implemented at national and regional level. It analyses 38 programmes that reveal a rich landscape of innovative initiatives, confirming the value of these collaborations for developing effective responses adapted to the labour market reality, and identifying key features to consolidate these programmes as pillars of employment policy:

• Diversifying management instruments, by adding the contractual framework to the current, predominantly grant-based model, could provide complementary tools to address some of the challenges identified in programme implementation.
• A more flexible approach to selection criteria, not limited exclusively to the economic factor and not restricting participation to non-profit organisations, opening up more often to professional private operators, could help ensure the technical capacity of partner organisations and foster innovation in projects.
• Programme duration is a critical factor for effectiveness. Exploring formulas that allow greater continuity over time —whether by reforming the grant framework or through complementary instruments— could therefore favour more sustained interventions and stable programmes.
• A balanced link between funding and results can incentivise service quality: implementing flexible models that appropriately combine process-based and results-based payments could improve the effectiveness and efficiency of interventions.
• As regards results evaluation, a more structured follow-up and monitoring framework, integrating process and impact indicators from the initial design, would contribute to the continuous improvement of programmes.

Finally, the document sets out the lessons learned, as well as some of the features that could improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the design, implementation and results of these programmes.