Public employment services like NAV, the PES Network, and their counterparts across Europe carry more responsibility for inclusive employment than most people realise. This piece looks at what they are genuinely trying to do, where the gap to reality lies, and why their performance is becoming more urgent.
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. Jobcentre Plus in the UK. Arbetsförmedlingen in Sweden. UWV in the Netherlands. Across the continent, these bodies are coordinated through the PES Network, a formal cooperation structure under the European Commission that benchmarks performance, shares practice, and tries to align policy across more than 30 member countries.
They are not relics. At their best, they are the connective tissue between people and opportunity.
What they are actually trying to do
The stated agenda of the PES Network is more ambitious than most people realise. The current strategic priorities include integrating people who are furthest from the labour market — disabled people, long-term unemployed individuals, migrants — while also managing the workforce disruptions that come from climate policy, automation, and the digital transition.
NAV, in particular, has invested seriously in supported employment approaches based on the Individual Placement and Support methodology. The idea is straightforward but the execution is hard: instead of preparing someone for a hypothetical future job, you place them into real work immediately and provide structured support around them. Evidence from multiple countries shows that this works, including for people with significant mental health conditions who were previously considered unemployable.
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 disability employment gap across the EU still sits at roughly 24 percentage points. Disabled people participate in the labour market at dramatically lower rates than non-disabled people, and that gap has been stubborn for decades. Public employment services are the primary public mechanism for closing it.
At the same time, algorithmic tools are entering employment services. 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.