In a new piece on the Nesta blog, Geoff Mulgan makes the case for an Open Jobs commons to help address persistent issues in the UK labour market: “stagnant social mobility; stagnant pay; stagnant productivity; and major failures of transition to work for many young people.” Mulgan argues that while innovations around the labour market abound, they are “having little or no impact on much of the workforce.”
Mulgan’s approach for addressing the problem relies on both data and collective intelligence:
“We believe there is a solution to this problem – the deliberate cultivation of an open commons of real time labour market data, available to everyone: let’s call it Open Jobs for short. That would allow UK cities and regions to achieve a far more intelligent jobs market, guided by accurate real time data and analytic tools to help decision makers at every level – from Whitehall departments to school leavers.
The promise would be to achieve the combination of observation, analysis, prediction and action that we have called a ‘collective intelligence assembly’ – equivalents of which exist in other fields ranging from cancer care to the environment – in this case, with the aim of empowering job seekers and employers to do better.”
