Building Youth Employability through Skills (BYETS) 

The Project

In Bangladesh among the employed, about 85% are engaged in informal jobs with low productivity and low income. The burden of unemployment is not homogeneous as women, educated, and rural youth are over-represented within the youth NEET group. Furthermore, as education and training opportunities have started emerging into the digital spaces, youth with lower access to digital services, particularly women and girls, have been affected disproportionately with loss in jobs and education opportunities, creating a ‘digital divide’. Most employers in Bangladesh also lack the awareness of and incentives for implementing decent working conditions for their workers, which further inhibits skilled youth to find decent employment.

Understanding the importance of the issue, BYETS will work with TSPs to improve their capacity to deliver market-driven training and job placement services to job-seeking youth. The project will also enable the TSPs to offer customised entrepreneurship development support to youth seeking self-employment opportunities. In partnership with private sector employers, the project will assist them to either improve existing workplace-based training (WBT) systems or set up new ones within their enterprises to upskill and reskill existing workers, particularly women.

Project Goals

• To support TSPs to design and deliver market-driven training services in selected sectors
  BYETS will collaborate with private TSPs to develop their capacity in designing and delivering market-driven training and job placement services that cater to the need of the employers in the AP and ICT sectors. BYETS will support TSPs to engage with employers at every stage of the training design and delivery and enable a sustainable and mutually beneficial working relationship between the two parties. In addition, the project will engage with the two sector-specific industry skills councils (ISC) and/or industry associations and develop their capacity to bridge the gap between TSPs and the industry by facilitating linkage between the two parties.
• To support employers in adopting WBT systems within their workplaces in selected sectors
  BYETS will support private sector employers in the AP and RMG sectors to adopt Swisscontact’s proven WBT-model in their workplaces. Employers will implement a customised and sustainable WBT system to train unskilled new workers and upskill semi-skilled existing workers for improved efficiency and performance. This will improve the overall productivity of the private companies and help them achieve production and cost-efficiency.