Transition Support

Sometimes, good ideas have to wait a long time before they get realized.  For one such idea that is almost ten years old, the time has now come.

In the past months, many governments supported the income of individuals and of companies to keep up demand. Now the attention is switching towards a revival of the economy. This should not mean restoring the pre-Corona situation. Employment in a number of sectors will obviously decline, while vacancies in others will increase. This demands a quite dramatic shift of employment from declining to growing sectors, which need different skills.

Who will pay for such a large programme of re-skilling?  The Dutch government has recently reserved a token amount for this purpose, which is hardly worth mentioning. Time to come back to the proposition of Bram Eidhof and Bernold Nieuwesteeg from 2011 to create a national investment fund to finance re-skilling programmes for people who want to switch from shrinking to expanding sectors. They created the foundation InvestMens and showed the viability of the concept, involving the manpower company Randstad, Start Foundation, the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs, the Rabobank and the pension fund PGGM as investors in the fund. A decade ago, however, there was not sufficient political urgency. This is different now. But financing adult education to facilitate the transition from work to work is still an obstacles, as Eidhof and Nieuwesteeg argue in an article in Het Financieele Dagblad (16 May 2020).

Time to have a fresh look at their proposal!