If you want a bricklayer job, you need bricklayer’s qualifications. But what if your potential employer doesn’t understand your qualifications? What if your qualifications can’t be formally recognised?

Lack of transparency and common understanding of qualifications often prevents employers from filling vacancies and jobseekers from finding work.

An ETF project on qualifications in the Mediterranean is adopting a new approach to this old problem. It aims to develop qualifications that will be valid across the region—in Egypt, France, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Spain and Tunisia.

‘This will enhance the mobility of the people in the region and will allow companies in these sectors to recruit skilled people easier,’ said Jean-Marc Castejon, the ETF’s project team leader.

And this is important because unemployment is the main social problem in the region.

The project aims to create frameworks for four most common jobs in two key industries: waiter and receptionist in tourism, and bricklayer and site supervisor in construction.

The idea is first to make qualifications transparent, then to facilitate their convergence, before ultimately setting up common qualifications in the seven countries. The ETF works directly with employers to define the problems and develop new qualifications that could help solve them.

ETF head of operations and senior officials and experts met on 20 and 21 June with national teams to take stock of the work done so far.

Eva Jimeno, Head of Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Unit at ETF, underlined that the project fits well with the European Commission’s newly released package of measures to better manage migration flows from the Southern Mediterranean region.