The Undersecretary of Economic Development of Bogotá, Sebastián Marulanda, participated in the opening session of the OECD's Local Skills Week. This global event, which takes place between February 15 and 17, seeks to explore and highlight various strategies carried out at the local level to ensure that populations adapt to new working conditions in terms of competitiveness and innovation.
In his speech, Undersecretary Marulanda explained the strategies that have been implemented in Bogotá to train local human talent in new skills related to technological advancement and new conditions in this phase of reactivation, "In Bogotá we have been working on three training components to provide new tools to youth. The first is Soy Digital program, through we seek to provide tools focused on telecommunications and information technologies to more than 5000 young people through an agreement with Linkedin".
"Understanding that Bogotá has become a hub for BPO and call-center services, we have a program to generate 2000 additional places for people to study English at the B1 and B2 levels," said the Undersecretary of Economic Development when explaining the second strategy being implemented in the Colombian capital.
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As a third highlighted strategy, the Undersecretary presented the partnership between Bogotá and the National Learning Service (SENA), to strengthen soft skills, "We are working to strengthen young peoples’ profiles with digital skills so that their job profiles are more attractive and respond to the demand that exists in the local productive sector," he said.
These strategies seek to capitalize on the gains in the productivity and digitalization processes that have been accelerated by the pandemic, in order to reduce the gaps in the labor market and bet on the future productivity of young people. These initiatives are complemented and centralized in The Opportunities Portal, a website that compiles and spreads words about the offerings that Bogotá has in education, employment, credits for microenterprises, and support for entrepreneurship.
The following image shows the Opportunities Portal and some of the options on offer:
According to Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, the Director of the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions, and Cities, "A huge investment is needed for the job profiles of the working population to adapt to the changes associated with automation, clean industries, and post-pandemic conditions." She also stressed the importance of promoting the participation of the adult population in the labor market, "identifying the needs of the productive sector to design a commensurate training offer by local governments."
According to the commissioner for City Promotion for the City of Barcelona, Pau Solanilla Franco, "Talent is the new oil and for this reason we need to make massive investments to train human resources in the skills that the near future requires".
At the end of his speech, Undersecretary Marulanda highlighted policies that have been developed in Bogotá to respond to unemployment amongst vulnerable groups such as women, youth, and the elderly. "Our public agency has been strengthened to place 30,000 people in new jobs, applying differential, age, and gender approaches, through the intermediation between company offerings and these populations’ profiles. We went from 4000 people placed in jobs in 2019 to 30,000 people last year."
The OECD's Local Skills Week is a global event that seeks to explore how local communities can overcome local skills gaps and mismatches by helping people improve their skills throughout their working lives. This conference brought together leading experts, as well as local policy makers, businesses, workers' representatives, and professionals, to discuss the challenges and opportunities that the future of work will bring to cities and regions.
