HECAT - Disruptive Technologies Supporting Labour Market Decision Making

The Horizon 2020 project Hecat aims to investigate, demonstrate and pilot a disruptive technology to support labour market decision making by unemployed citizens and those seeking to help them. At one stage or another, almost half of all EU citizens will rely on a Public Employment Services (PES), and so this is a key touchpoint of a contemporary state and has impacts on citizen’s thinking about social cohesion, care and existential wellbeing. The ambition of the project is to improve citizen’s experience and outcomes of unemployment by offering real-time evidence-based insight into their personal position in the labour market. Hecat builds on the experience and learning of existing basic algorithmic techniques used by some European PES administrations to: - deliver labour market insight directly to unemployed citizen and so is built on European values of open data, collaboration, transparency and citizen-participation - broaden out the focus on quantity of jobs drawn from the ‘economic imagination’ to add a focus on job quality and sustainable employment - go beyond profiling the ‘stock’> unemployed people, to incorporate measures of labour demand, and so take a labour market approach - go beyond the profiling of ‘problem categories’ of citizens that current survey-data based systems use, to exploit emerging big-data processing and analytics to treat each individual as a unique complex subject in a real-time and near limitless database that leverages the insight trapped inside statistical agencies - frame the development in deep contextual insight into the origin and transformation of the experience of unemployment and its administration based on anthropological inquiry - bring this insight into the hands of decision makers with a a platform-UX that exploits novel artificial intelligence with learning capabilities and cutting edge, accessible visualisation and gamification techniques to support knowledge discovery and decision making at the critical moment, as a decision support system.