Aptitude assessment for labor market integration

The research project, which is a collaboration between the Uppsala Immigration Lab, Uppsala University and the Employment Agency, examines the role that different psychological characteristics play in the individual's success on the labor market. By combining modern psychological methods with labor market economic perspectives, the project aims to deepen our insights into how these characteristics affect the individual's opportunities for establishment and adjustment in the labor market.

In the long run, the ambition is to develop interventions to influence the individual's opportunities and to create tools for assessment and prioritization in labor market policy efforts. By examining and measuring characteristics such as general intelligence, self-regulation and self-efficacy, the project aims to understand how these factors influence individuals' success in education and work.

In a first step, we will develop a battery for measuring psychological characteristics with relevance to the ability to handle situations and challenges in working life. The ambition is to use the latest scientific insights to produce methods that, through relatively simple and quick tests, can give a picture of the individual's conditions and needs. The test must be usable in different target groups with varying education, language skills, work experience, etc. We are therefore planning to carry out pilot surveys for different groups of jobseekers, with different labor market histories, and hopefully also in groups of people who are in work.

However, the pilot studies are not expected to yield only methodological results. By using insights from psychological research on how different indicators relate to the ability to handle challenges in different areas, we get a picture of how such characteristics look in different groups of job seekers and how these values relate to those in more general populations. This is particularly important for groups where we lack richer information about e.g. labor market history and school background, or where we have reason to believe that the persons may have been negatively affected by previous events and environmental factors. Such knowledge can be decisive in decisions about allocating labor market policy programs, and also indicate that other interventions (e.g. health promotion) are needed for the individual to be able to approach working life.

By combining collected data with register data, we can get a good picture of how the psychological indicators are correlated with e.g. education, marital status, work experience, age, gender and background. It is also possible to relate the collected information to previous program allocations and assessments at the Employment Service, which gives the opportunity to, for instance, see how job brokers' assessments compare to what is provided by research-based psychological analyses.

With a developed test battery, there are great opportunities to broaden the studies to different target groups (different professional groups, school children and students, etc.), and by extension to find practical applications of the tool and interventions to influence important factors. Understanding how psychological characteristics relate to position and opportunities in working life is particularly important given that an expected development where new technology sets new demands and entails major changes in the labor market. Our ability to face these changes is dependent on knowledge of which factors are most central to the individual, and of how the availability of these looks in different professions, industries and groups.