Competing for Talent: What Role Can Employment- and Skills-Based Mobility Projects Play?
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Highlights
Skills-based mobility projects face scale challenges. Better planning, private-sector buy-in, and longer timeframes are needed to match workers with jobs across borders.
- Employment- and skills-based mobility projects are important but have moved few people. Germany’s Triple Win project placed 4,900 nurses in Germany over nine years, and it took three years before any workers moved through Belgium's THAMM-Enabel project.
- Common challenges include slow administrative processes, difficulty securing employer buy-in, high upfront costs, and short project cycles that prevent meaningful scale.
- Projects' main value is testing new migration corridors and recruitment models. Policymakers should set realistic expectations and avoid positioning pilots as rivals to established private recruitment channels.
- Tracking outcomes rigorously, building a long-term vision for scale, engaging employers early, and pairing projects with visa liberalization or bilateral labor agreements could improve the effectiveness of these projects.
Many countries in Europe and beyond are contending with acute labor shortages and looking to immigration as one policy option to sustain and support economic growth, alongside efforts to retrain local workers and improve productivity. At the same time, lower- and middle-income countries with fast-growing populations are exploring ways to better link their nationals with economic opportunities at home and abroad. Legal migration pathways that connect unemployed workers in such countries with hard-to-fill jobs abroad are thus gaining interest in both origin and destination countries.
To date, however, employment- and skills-based mobility projects have encountered challenges in fully realizing their anticipated benefits. These include difficulties building up project infrastructure and securing private-sector engagement. As a result, many have facilitated the movement of small numbers of people.
This policy brief explores the case for employment- and skills-based mobility projects, looking at how different types of cooperation can support legal migration pathways, as well as common challenges these projects face. The brief also discusses strategies for achieving economies of scale and these projects' unique value—including the chance they offer to test new migration corridors or new recruitment models, while broadening cooperation opportunities with partner countries.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The Case for Mobility Projects
3 Common Challenges
4 Strategies for Achieving Greater Scale and Impact
5 Conclusion and Recommendations
About the Global Skills and Talent Initiative
Anchored in the premise that immigration policy must be part of a broader skills and talent strategy, the Initiative has a particular focus on employment-based immigration and the supports that can help immigrants apply their full range of educational and professional skills.
About the Global Program
The Global Program bridges policy advice, research, and candid dialogue to design effective migration policies, drawing on global evidence and anticipating the forces reshaping how people move.
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