The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated changes in the format of labor-management relations and the way we work. For many organizations, the crisis revealed gaps in the skills people have and those in need of jobs in the digital context.

Upskilling the workforce in Kyrgyzstan to bridge the digital divide is a complex issue that requires business leaders, opinion-formers, the government, and educators to work together to make our economy more resilient, efficient, and inclusive.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the UNDP, with the support from the Government of Japan, has launched comprehensive measures to address the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic. Some of these activities aim at the economic empowerment of entrepreneurs, employable citizens, and labor market development. These last few months, together with the C&K Management Limited, we have been on a journey to develop several on-line trainings to provide an opportunity for citizens to use an existing online platform which would allow workers to be registered in the database to match with potential employers, as well as gain access to up-skilling trainings to be more marketable for the new context.

“We have been working on adapting skill based curriculum and translating online courses into local languages. In few weeks, we will provide online trainings to help unemployed people, migrants, and MSMEs to gain practical skills that meet the trends of the current labor market and ensure greater opportunities to become “future-proof”, – says Mr. Srinivas Balusu, Head of Learning Sciences at C&K Management Limited, a company from Hyderabad, India, which spearheads the capacity building and skill oriented training development.

The developed training modules consider the local job market demands and focus on improving entrepreneurship skills, marketing for micro-, small and medium enterprises (MSME), internet navigation for MSMEs, graphic design and production, employability skills and the like. All trainings will be engaging and easy to comprehend, include interactive and graphic modeling, assignments, testing and evaluation sections. Also, the participants will be able to choose the Kyrgyz or Russian language module.

We expect that more than 1,000 users of the online job match platform will take part in these up-skilling trainings, 100 of them to match with employers, and hope to reach at least 40% women’s enrollment.

This activity is a part of the UNDP project "Supporting an Inclusive and Multi-sectoral Response to COVID-19 and Addressing its Socio-economic Impact in the Kyrgyz Republic", which aims at the comprehensive and human-centered socio-economic response to COVID-19 and is financed by the Government of Japan.