There is a network of institutions that most working people have never thought about. They sit quietly at the intersection of social policy and labour markets, carrying enormous responsibility and receiving relatively little public attention. They are public employment services — and they shape the employment prospects of millions of people across Europe and beyond.
NAV in Norway. Bundesagentur für Arbeit in Germany. Arbetsförmedlingen in Sweden. UWV in the Netherlands. Jobcentre Plus in the UK. Across Europe, most of these bodies cooperate through the European Network of Public Employment Services (the PES Network), set up by a decision of the European Parliament and Council. Its members are the public employment services of all EU countries, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, together with the European Commission, and it compares PES performance through benchmarking, fosters mutual learning, and feeds into the European Employment Strategy.
They are not relics. At their best, they are the connective tissue between people and opportunity.
What they are actually trying to do
The agenda is broader than most people realise. In the PES Network's 2025 capacity report, the services' own strategic objectives centre on reducing long-term unemployment and supporting groups in vulnerable situations and young people, while they are also adapting to the green transition and to digitalisation, including the use of AI.
NAV, for example, offers Individual Placement and Support (IPS — individuell jobbstøtte) to people with mental health or substance use problems who are receiving treatment, with a job specialist working as part of their treatment team. The idea is straightforward but the execution is hard: instead of long preparation for a hypothetical future job, the job search starts quickly, the focus is on ordinary paid work, and support is built around the person. Norway's national guidelines on IPS state that international research shows it is the method that works best for helping people with severe mental illness into ordinary work, and that it probably more than doubles their chance of getting a regular job.
The ambition across these institutions, at least on paper, is that no one capable of working should be excluded from the possibility of work.
The gap between stated aim and lived experience
Anyone who has spent time working with these institutions — or who has navigated them personally — knows that the distance between the ambition and the reality is often wide.
Waiting times stretch. Advice is generic where it should be specific. The language around disability and work capacity can feel stigmatising rather than empowering. There is often a compliance culture that optimises for process compliance rather than actual employment outcomes. And employers who receive referrals from public employment services frequently treat them as administrative obligations rather than genuine talent introductions.
None of this is inevitable. It is the product of funding decisions, institutional design, political priorities, and measurement frameworks that reward the wrong things. Knowing the cause does not minimise the frustration, but it does suggest the problem is solvable.
Why this is becoming more urgent
Three things are happening simultaneously that make the performance of public employment services more consequential than ever.
The employment gap between people with and without disabilities across the EU was 24.0 percentage points in 2024, according to Eurostat. Disabled people are in work at far lower rates than non-disabled people, and the gap has proved stubborn. Public employment services are the primary public mechanism for closing it.
At the same time, algorithmic tools are entering employment services: in 2025, 19 of the 32 public employment services in the PES Network reported using AI to improve their services, with jobseeker profiling among the areas being digitalised. Automated profiling, AI-assisted matching, and digital activation pathways can replicate existing biases at scale. The institutions that adopt these tools without careful governance will not fix the gap — they will entrench it faster.
And the workers most exposed to displacement from industrial and energy transition are largely the same people that public employment services are supposed to support: older workers, lower-skilled workers, workers in regions dependent on declining sectors. The pressure is not easing.
What good practice looks like
There are genuinely strong examples within the PES world. The institutions that perform well tend to share a few characteristics: employer engagement teams that build ongoing relationships rather than making one-off referrals, integration of health and employment support into a single touchpoint rather than separate siloed services, accountability frameworks that measure sustained employment rather than just benefit exit, and meaningful involvement of service users in how programmes are designed.
None of these are radical ideas. They are operational realities in places where someone made sustained decisions to do things differently.
The wider point
Public employment services are not glamorous. They do not attract the kind of attention that a technology startup or a high-profile employer initiative might. But for the people they exist to serve, they are among the most consequential institutions in the economy.
The disability employment gap will not close without them functioning well. The workers displaced by the green and digital transition will not find new footing without labour market intermediaries that take their situation seriously. The aspiration toward a more inclusive labour market requires these institutions to be taken seriously — by employers, by policymakers, and by the public.
Getting them right is not a peripheral concern. It is central to whether inclusion in work is real or merely aspirational.