Labour & Integration
Lifelong learning, changing societal structures and the need to maintain a strong skilled labour force are all important challenges of today’s labour market. Projects on the EU and other scales revolving around the labour market and integration deliver promising opportunities to understanding and shaping these conditions.
The professional world is changing due to multi-layered interdependent processes, including digitalisation, globalisation, migration, and an aging population. Enterprises and skilled labour have become increasingly mobile and independent of fixed locations. At the same time, a shortage in experts has already become noticeable in many areas. Against this background, public and private employers increasingly need to adapt to these new circumstances. This is the case with respect to training and higher education opportunities, but also regarding a policy of human resources that takes into consideration an employee’s different chapters in life. At the same time, being in employment can be considered identity-shaping, giving people a sense of meaning and purpose in life. For the majority of migrants, access to the labour market is considered alongside housing and education as one of the main criteria for successful integration. There are numerous good examples for how public and non-governmental actors have facilitated integration of immigrants into society and the labour market.
Our experience in the “Labour & Integration” field
Whether it be labour market integration, labour mobility or the integration of refugees (both in society in general and with regard to labour market), many of our projects cover topics at the intersection of the labour market and migrant integration. This includes projects such as Best Agers Lighthouses (Age Management in small and medium-sized enterprises and organisations), EYES (Empowering youth through entrepreneurial skills) and the regional planning model “living – learning – working – inter-municipal cooperation for the integration of refugees”, as well as some of the measures within SEMPRE and SEMPRE Accelerators, laying emphasis on the integration of refugees into society. Since many of our migration and labour-related projects are set in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, we are very familiar with the respective local conditions.
