The Observatory for Labor Insertion and Strengthening of Employability in Member Countries of the Pacific Alliance – Emple-ap, is a project seeking to improve employability and labor insertion rates among higher education graduate students in countries of the Pacific Alliance – PA (Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile). Permanent monitoring and analysis of needs and characteristics of the labor market will be carried out for this purpose, as well as the construction of national guidelines and policies that contribute to create relevant education offers and strengthening of academic programs provided by higher education institutions (HEIs) in participating countries.
The project will result in the creation of a Regional Labor Observatory whose main objective is to assess the insertion in the labor market of gradated students through extracting, processing, analyzing and disseminating all available information about university employment of involved actors (graduated students, businesses, HEIs, governments, etc.). Resulting analyses will provide information to improve employability of graduated students, advise companies in terms of recruiting graduated staff and to inform HEIs on synergies between training and labor market needs. The Observatory will use measurement tools and methodologies for indicator homogenization and standardization, to allow reliable comparative analysis that provide a proper view of the behavior of analyzed labor markets. Indeed, Emple-ap will carry out not just the definition of the state-of-the-art in terms of employment measuring and information analysis but also the review and standardization of measurement methodologies used in each of the countries of the Pacific Alliance and their local labor observatories, a new paradigm related to knowledge transfer within universities, based on the idea of social innovation as a key for social development and cohesion, both at the regional and international level.
Funded by the European Commission, Emple-ap will be developed by a consortium of fourteen Latin American and European universities led by Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas of Bogotá, Colombia. Its activities will be based on the strengthening of human talent and promotion of productivity and competitiveness of its member countries (Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Peru).
In the course of the four-year period, the project will suggest a series of activities to allow homogenization of tools and methodologies used in the PA countries to measure and control variables related to employment, labor market and insertion in the real sector of professionals in knowledge areas of their specialty. Besides, the implementation of the labor observatory at HEIs will offer students and practitioners a reliable system of information about existing opportunities in the region industry and allow them to find jobs more easily abroad.
The project results will also contribute to governments’ initiatives to strengthen employability and construction of new government policies on this issue.
We are Emple-ap