Knowing the ground reality of the labour market is essential to provide quality career guidance for us. For that sake we have conducted a pilot field research in Jumla which had two aim:
Firstly, to gather more data about the potential of Jumla’s labour market now and in future. Secondly we wanted to test our core service: the interest based psychometric assessment in the setting of Jumla and assess the feasibility to work with local partner organizations.
For that Purpose Inge Patsch and Sagar Ghimire have been traveling from 5.3.2017 till 13.3.2017 to Jumla. Sushil Devkota from RACE Nepal was our local contact point and helped us arrange various meetings as well as the workshops in the schools. We furthermore could use their local office as a workplace.
The format for assessing the labour market seems to work well. Further similar research should be conducted in other districts of Nepal got get a more refined picture of the labour market. In most interviews with government officials, they first would start to tell us the number of governmental employees. While training enumerators we should emphasize therefor that they dedicatedly ask their interview partner for employment in public and private sector.
In terms of data collection we could conclude, that the current format serves well to assess the demand in the labour market for most sectors. For further interviews we can note that especially for interviewing governmental officials it is useful to bring an official letter (partnership with ILO?) to access them as some of them were hesitant sharing their insights with them (we did NOT ask them any personalized data though).
Also this requires sufficient time in the field as it might take several days to get the appointment with the right person. It is important to report those officials who have been working in the district for a longer period, as most information were drawn from their memory rather than official documets.
The watchadoo videos were rather easy to produce as long as one does not strive for perfect video or audio. While the footage made outside was having an nice picture, it was a challenge to get the clear sound (even though we used an audio-device directly next to the person to record it. The inside video has the challenge of the worse lightening. People were spontaneously able to give the interview and we did all of them in a one shot. For some we repeated single questions in a second shot.
The logistic of doing the workshops and taking the assessment in such remote areas is a challenge but doable. It requires sufficient time for processing. Assessments and Job & Edu Booklets are best prepared beforehand so to not have to rely on the online job & edu DB in the field.
A bigger challenge would be to find and to keep connected with local partners. We left the field without any specific agreements on any further cooperation. CDN would need to develop a clear concept on how local partners can overcome technical hurdles to use our system as well as how to train and prepare them. Last but not least we need to find organizations which dedicately are involved in career counselling and youth guidance and figure out which other tools they would need that the online assessment becomes a feasible instrument for their works. The development of a business case which works for CDN as well as for the local partners seems one important big next step.