What public-private partnerships mean for the Youth Guarantee

The Youth Guarantee is an activation scheme to ensure that young people can receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education and apprenticeship within a certain period of time after leaving education or being unemployed.

Often, behind a Youth Guarantee (YG) offer there is a public-private partnership (PPP) in the skills domain. The partnerships can be an advantage for the YG, provided the motivation for skills is at the heart of the public and private partners’ collaboration. This means a commitment to good quality education and training and employment prospects for the learners that is a commitment to positive outcomes or impact.

What are skills-related PPPs for?

• Knowledge: the function of these PPPs is to assess or anticipate skills needs, develop curricula or innovative pedagogy;
• Skills provision: the majority of skills-PPPs are set to provide education and training programmes, sometimes combined with other services such as career guidance, competency assessment to young people, training for trainers and coaches, advice to companies and other services;
• Resources: these PPPs have the purpose to provide training equipment or upgrade a training centre infrastructure.

Are they integrated in the skills system?

• The PPP scope often depends on the initial design and its evolution over time. A PPP may operate locally while another would span across regions or an entire country. And, some PPPs address a wide range of learners and others focus on specific training needs;
• Whether large or small, we find PPPs that are fully recognised and integrated in a skills systems, those that are partly integrated, and the ad-hoc PPPs. The latter are closer to the idea of a pilot or experimental project. 

Is it easy to become members? 

• A partnership in the skills field can be open to new members even after its establishment, this being a relevant difference compared to traditional PPPs in the infrastructure market; 
• However, we also find PPPs that can only be joined based on set conditions, or the closed ones.

In short, PPPs in the skills sector share common features yet are very diverse. This is true also with regard to member organisations: the public partners can be national agencies, local offices, and/or schools; among the private partners there are individual companies, sector organisations, and/or expert centres; and we find civil society organisations.

It is becoming frequent that civil society organisations (CSOs) engage in partnerships with public and private actors to address students, unemployed youth and small companies too. Triangular agreements made of public, private and civil society partners have proven to spur innovation. CSOs are able to mediate and speak the language of both the public and private side, and offer contributions on transformative education. It is worth noting that many CSOs were planning to expand their work on human capital development as a reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, as documented by the ETF study interviews (see link below).

Let's not forget that organisations decide to join forces to attain what none of them could do alone. A partnership has many advantages – needs assessment can be more effective, adjusting a training programme be easier and more frequent, the transition from learning to a job smoother, and the advice on young people’s career be more personalised – which effective and outcome-oriented PPPs are able to turn into better learning experience and chances of employment for the students, the ETF study found (see link below).

Whether they are bi-lateral or triangular, PPPs that build around skills needs are more than a contract and their concern is more than efficient spending, said differently they extend the notion of PPP beyond its traditional definition. With the above mentioned characteristics and adaptation to local needs and situations, the public-private partnerships in the field of skills can really work for the young and less young learners.

Further reading:

Event Public Private Partnerships in skills development and value for Youth Guarantee implementation | Open Space (europa.eu)

Blog Public Private Partnerships in skills development and value for Youth Guarantee implementation | Open Space (europa.eu)

CSOs study Area 5.1 - Civil society organizations | Open Space (europa.eu)

CSOs report dissemination The country stories: Civil Society Organisations and the Human Capital Development | Open Space (europa.eu)

PPPs study Public–private partnerships for skills development: A governance perspective – Volume I. Thematic overview | ETF (europa.eu)