Portugal

ICT to Aid Unemployed Portuguese

Over 1,700 unemployed textile workers were offered intensive courses to get ICT skills. The original target was to readmit 10% of the trained people to the job market by 2009. Approaching the end of the three-year project, the organisers can hail a readmission rate of 40%. The success of the project, called TII (Technology, Innovation and Initiative), can be attributed to an effective public-private partnership while the training sessions were tailored to the needs of the workers and gave them IT skills useful for finding jobs in the evolving textile industry, increasingly steered towards high-tech and high-quality production to shun low-cost competition from emerging countries. Some sources expect that such retrained workers could find employment in lower-skilled healthcare IT jobs (e.g. data entry, billing etc.)

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