Vocational training of the unemployed under the State Programme Labour Market and Employment Promotion
Belarus's labour, employment and social protection bodies referred 11,900 unemployed people to vocational training, retraining, upgrading and short courses in 2021 to 2024, 2,300 of them in 2024, and 91.9 percent of the 2024 referrals were training ordered by an employer with a guaranteed job.
2,300 people, unemployed people referred to vocational training, retraining, upgrading and training courses (measure 16), 2024. 11,900 people, unemployed people referred to the same training, cumulative, 2021 to 2024. Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Republic of Belarus, report on the implementation in 2021 to 2024 of the State Programme Labour Market and Employment Promotion for 2021 to 2025, retrieved 2026-10-17.
The move, and what it needed
District employment bodies refer registered unemployed people to short vocational courses, mostly training ordered by a named employer who guarantees the job afterwards, with the state paying tuition and a stipend.
Preconditions
- A register of unemployed people kept by district labour offices
- State and enterprise training centres able to run short worker courses
- Employers in a mostly state-owned economy who accept a hiring guarantee
Limits: The ministry reports on its own programme, in a Russian-language PDF; the figures are on pages 6 to 7. Referrals are not completions or job outcomes. The scale is very small: 2,300 people in a country of about 9 million, which the report itself puts at 6 percent of unemployed people needing work, and registered unemployment in Belarus is low by design, so the count says little about adults in work. The same report gives a separate indicator, the share of employees who completed vocational training, at 16 percent in 2024, which sits closer to the construct but is employer training reported by the state, not a delivery. The 2021 start is the start of the current five-year programme; training of the unemployed by the employment bodies predates it and is not counted.