Counselors from the State Employment Service of Ukraine Love These SkillLab Features
SkillLab’s collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the World Bank, and the State Employment Service (SES) of Ukraine has reached a new milestone. The first phase of implementing SkillLab’s skills-first solution in two Ukrainian regions, Donetsk and Lviv, has been completed with promising results.
To address the labor market challenges posed by the ongoing war, SkillLab’s skills-first skill profiling and career guidance platform was deployed to connect people in need with jobs and education. Our tool bridges the gap between traditional employment services and modern digital solutions, providing a comprehensive and accessible resource for both counselors and job seekers.
Over the course of 2024, the project supported over 10,000 job seekers in Ukraine by helping them identify and articulate their skills, as reflected in user survey data. Users collectively added over 750,000 skills to their profiles, with 53% reporting increased confidence in their abilities and a better understanding of career paths and required skills.
The project helped the State Employment Service identify more than 100,000 career opportunities for Ukrainian job seekers, contributing to the employment of 4,000 people.
The positive impact is reflected in the stories of Ukrainian career counselors who work with SkillLab every day and witness its transformative effect on their clients. Liliia Nevirkovets, SkillLab's project coordinator for this collaboration, asked four counselors about their favorite features on SkillLab’s skills-first tool that have helped them in their career counseling work.
Counselor Iryna’s favorite feature:
I like everything here. We've been observing people's reactions when they add their skills. After filling out their profile, people begin to see new opportunities. People don’t limit themselves to the career path they have chosen. They see that they can do other things and that their skills are relevant for different professions
For over 23 years, Iryna has been dedicated to helping job seekers navigate their professional challenges. In her experience, job seekers often come to the Employment Center with low confidence, unsure of their abilities or career prospects. Iryna has found that working with SkillLab encourages them to reflect on their experiences and identify skills they may not have recognized as valuable. This process helps people discover new opportunities and alternative career paths. Iryna has seen many job seekers gain a new perspective on their abilities and confidence after creating a skill profile and generating their personalized CV.
The introduction of SkillLab has also significantly enhanced her career counseling process. For Iryna, access to detailed skill profiles allows her to more effectively analyze clients’ career options, considering both previous job titles and related fields. This insight enables counselors to identify opportunities beyond the job seekers' initial goals, encouraging them to explore roles they may not have realized they were suited for.
The outcomes of this approach are tangible. Iryna was able to help a young mother with degrees in nursing and social work transition into a role as a school psychologist. Similarly, a war veteran successfully transitioned into teaching “Defense of Ukraine,” drawing on his leadership and organizational skills.
“I believe that expanding access to SkillLab to more individuals would maximize its positive impact,” said Iryna. “It will allow even more people to discover their strengths and explore new career paths.
Counselor Oksana favourite features:
For me, it's the option to add hobbies. When people add professional experience, they are tense because they are in a public institution. When we get to the point of hobbies, people start laughing and joking. This format of the game gives people calm and the opportunity to tell more about themselves. But it is a game that later brings them real work.
Oksana has been a career advisor at the Lviv branch of the Employment Center for over 10 years. When SkillLab was first introduced, it sparked both excitement and hesitation, particularly among older clients who were wary of online tools and potential scams. However, by taking them step-by-step through the profile-building process, Oksana created a supportive environment that encouraged them to fully engage.
Oksana particularly values how SkillLab’s inclusion of hobbies enriches her interactions with job seekers. While discussing professional experience can sometimes feel formal and stressful, talking about hobbies creates a more relaxed atmosphere. This approach, particularly with veterans, helps them feel more comfortable and engaged, making the process more motivating and enjoyable. Oksana recalls one veteran who, while working on his profile, remembered his passion for mechanics. This realization inspired him to consider opening a business repairing military vehicles, a career path he had not considered before.
SkillLab also simplifies the process of matching candidates to job vacancies. By comparing job descriptions with SkillLab CVs, Oksana can identify strong candidates and match them to roles more effectively.
“The combination of the platform and personalized guidance makes SkillLab truly valuable. This collaborative approach empowers job seekers to discover new opportunities, gain confidence, and take meaningful steps toward their next career,” said Oksana.
Counselor Lyudmyla favourite features:
Adding experience and skills. You know, it's like a game. You click on it, and you wonder what skills it will offer you. And then you see if it's a good fit or not. We focus on adding skills so that the app can analyze them and give us recommendations.
Before becoming a career advisor, Lyudmyla was a job seeker at the Employment Service. This dual experience has deepened her ability to empathize with and assist her clients. As a job-seeker using SkillLab, viewing her skills organized in a CV format encouraged her to think about her skills in new ways.
Now working as a career advisor, Lyudmyla uses SkillLab to guide others through their job search journeys. She helps users set up their accounts and walks them through the platform step-by-step. For clients who are struggling to complete the profiles, she highlights their progress and motivates them to refine their skills-based CVs for better results with employers.
“Creating a skill profile on SkillLab is engaging, as if you are playing a game. Each time a user clicks on a skill, it reveals new suggestions,” Lyudmyla told us. When advising clients, she emphasizes the importance of focusing on increasing their skills, as this enables the platform to analyze and provide tailored recommendations for career paths and development opportunities.
Lyudmyla hopes that the continued cooperation between SES Ukraine and SkillLab will lead to further improvements and refinements of the application to make it more relevant to the Ukrainian labor market and more user-friendly.
Counselor Zoryana favourite features:
The skill interview in the app, when people add their experience and skills. As we fill out the profile together, people begin to trust us more, they share their experiences. This helps them psychologically.
Zoryana has been a career advisor at the Employment Center since 2004, specializing in assisting unemployed individuals with job placement, creating CVs, and referrals to training or socially beneficial work. Many of Zoryana’s clients are young professionals, mothers returning to the workforce after maternity leave, or displaced persons looking for job opportunities in the new regions.
The introduction of SkillLab provided Zoryana with a fresh perspective. The platform’s skill-based approach encourages counselors to consider informal life experiences and personal interests when matching clients with jobs. For job seekers with limited professional experience, adding skills gained from everyday life to their CV can help increase their chances with employers. Zoryana finds that SkillLab is especially helpful for young job seekers. It expands their self-awareness of the skills they possess and explore various career paths they could pursue.
However, the most valuable feature according to Zoryana is the skill profiling process, and for such an unexpected reason. “As clients add their experiences and skills to the platform, they often feel more at ease with the counselor, opening up about their interests and aspirations,” said Zoryana. It turns out that the skill profiling feature also brings a positive psychological impact on the interaction between job seekers and counselors.
Zoryana’s wish before she concluded her conversation was that SkillLab’s continuous collaboration with the SES will match even more job seekers with job opportunities, also based on their location.
The experience of the Ukrainian SES career counselors show a positive impact of enhancing their counselling work with a skills-first approach. Are you also working with the employment service in your country and interested to try using a skills-first approach? Contact us to know how to start!
Featured image by olia danilevich via Pexels