Conception of a monitoring system for municipal employment promotion in the city of Pforzheim

The city of Pforzheim plans to introduce a regular reporting system for municipal employment promotion in order to better manage employment promotion measures and create annual programs.

The aim of this monitoring is to be able to systematically track the development of important target figures for employment promotion measures using the most suitable indicators possible. Descriptive monitoring alone does not allow for a well-founded impact analysis that can provide an answer to the methodological problem of the “what-if analysis” (analysis of the counterfactual situation). However, as a very important first step, it provides a sound data basis for discussions on the effectiveness and efficiency of municipal employment promotion measures. On this basis, signs of deficits and the need for prioritization and action can be derived in a structured manner.

The concept developed first briefly explained the potential opportunities and strengths of monitoring, as well as its limitations, in order to formulate requirements for a suitable monitoring system. In addition, the possibilities of linking a monitoring system with benchmarking were shown and possible advantages and disadvantages of setting target values within the framework of monitoring were discussed. Based on global targets, a target indicator system was then developed to measure the achievement of the targets and its empirical feasibility was demonstrated. Finally, key recommendations for suitable monitoring were summarized from a scientific perspective.

The concrete initial operational implementation of the monitoring and the formulation of concrete target values were not the subject of this research project.