Public Labour Market Infrastructure: New digital horizons for public employment services

Drawing inspiration from research that highlights the importance of feasible job search (Zune and Demazière, 2021) in PES, this paper reports on an application of Design Thinking (DT) as a human-centered approach to developing a PES labour market information (LMI) citizen tool in Ireland. DT has been endorsed as an approach to addressing complex social policy problems (Lewis et.al 2020), through collaboration and iterative prototyping.

Against the backdrop of pay and income transparency laws, which in turn has led to the improvement of income and pay data as well as data infrastructure, the project explores the development of a tool to give unemployed individuals high-quality, searchable data on income by region, occupation, and experience.

By way of empirics, the paper details a 3 stages DT programme, with N=59 participants, that iteratively problematised, co-developed, and evaluated a new LMI pay and income tool for use in Irish PES:

-One-on-one interviews with job seekers and caseworkers to gain insights into their expectations and challenges. -Benchmark walkthroughs to understand the complexities of existing web services. -Co-design sessions to generate user-informed approaches for displaying LMI related to income.

In this way, the paper showcases DT methods in action in the development of digital PES, highlighting how digital automation, algorithmic, and machine learning technologies can strengthen unemployed people's autonomy and feasible job search