Barcelona Activa is the public employment service of the city. The municipality oversees the service, which is also coordinated with the wider Catalan Employment Service.
In Spain, public employment services deliver vocational education and training (VET) apart from school programmes. They have organized active labour market policies at the local and regional levels for decades. Their activities include training, guidance, labour market intermediation and promoting entrepreneurship.
Barcelona Activa generates a register of the adult population that takes training in the city. The data cover the following themes:
- The socio-demographic profile of students, e.g., location of students and VET providers; gender and age of students across all programs and branches.
- The features of the training programmes, basically, distinguishing whether the programmes offer professional qualifications, are linked to strategic sectors, are targeted to young beneficiaries, teach foreign languages, or deliver short-term in-service training (e.g., occupational risks).
In the city, employment is closely aligned with a set of strategic sectors. The service creates synergies with some of them. For example, it participates in professional development workgroups in IT, disseminates the training actions launched by the Energy Efficiency Cluster of Catalonia and delivers online courses to the retail sector. Thus, the database has a strong potential to complement the general activities of an employment service with these fine-grained, purposeful, and strategic initiatives.
Barcelona Activa is an associated partner of project AIVET. This post draws on a description of the database that the officers of the service have kindly shared with us.
By Xavier Rambla (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)