Thirteen unemployed persons from the municipality of Buzim have started programmes of skills verification and requalification for welders, construction technicians, masons, carpenters and tile layers, within the pilot project “NEW APPROACH – Through Strengthening of Local Competitiveness of the Workforce to Increase the Employment Rate through RPL model”.
The pilot project is funded by the European Union and aims to contribute to the economic development of the Buzim area through a systematic approach to the problem of unemployment. Skills verification and requalification programmes for unemployed persons have been created as a result of examining the needs of the local labour market in Buzim, i.e. the needs of local employers for the workforce of a particular occupation.
Edin Kaukovic, one of the participants in the requalification programme for tile layers, believes that this project is very useful for unemployed people and similar projects should be implemented more often. Although he had already been working as a tile layer for many years, it was important for him to gain formal qualifications in order to better position himself on the labour market. As he stated, successful verification of his skills already enabled him to get concrete job offers.
The skills verification programme will be conducted by the Centre for Adult Education “EDUKA BH” in Tesanj, while the requalification programme will be conducted by the Centre for Adult Education – Gracanica.
The pilot project “NEW APPROACH” is implemented by the Association New Security Initiative from Sarajevo and the partners are the Buzim Municipality, the PI Employment Service of USC – municipal Bureau of Labour Buzim, the PI Mixed High School “Hasan Music”, the Centre for Adult Education – Gracanica and the company „Sirbegovic Engineering“.
Local Employment Partnership Buzim is one of the 19 established local employment partnerships within the project “Support to Local Employment Partnerships in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, which is funded by the European Union with €4 million and implemented by the International Labour Organization (ILO).