While in an ideal world the qualification preferences of job seekers and employers would coincide, in reality this is often not the case. Besides informational asymmetries (job seekers not knowing which qualifications are demanded by employers) the reason is that employers may be in need of qualifications that are not considered attractive by the job seekers.

The ISET Policy Institute (ISET-PI) was commissioned by the World Bank to assist the Social Service Agency (SSA) of Georgia, an agency of the Ministry of Labor, Health, and Social Affairs (MoLHSA), in setting up a system for providing job seekers with vocational and educational training (VET). The project had two specific goals.

In Georgia, employment is often found not through prevailing in fair, orderly selection processes, but through personal connections. This is a well-known fact almost nobody denies. It is evident in almost every Georgian firm and institution. In a hospital, you encounter a “nurse” not capable of the most basic medical accomplishments, in one of Tbilisi’s universities you meet a “cleaning woman” who is mentally ill, known for scaring everybody through aggressive and inappropriate behavior, and in the railway station, you buy a ticket from a clerk who knows nothing about regulations, timetables, and trains.

Before answering this question, let us define what economists usually mean by” informal employment”. There is some confusion with this term, and sometimes it is improperly used as a synonym for tax evasion or illegality. ILO defines informal employment as: employment “consisting of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the primary objective of generating employment and incomes to the persons concerned.

The consultancy aimed to identify training programs that addresses actual labor market demand and devise an algorithm for matching the unemployed with these programs taking account of their skills, work experience and motivation. As part of this project, ISET-PI aimed to identify vocational training programs that address actual labor market demand, and devise an algorithm to assign registered unemployed to these programs (taking account of their skills, work experience and motivation).