Employability among refugees and how it is affected by public integration programmes

To secure employment in a new country, refugees often go through a series of steps to enhance their employability. While many governments seek to maximise refugee employment rates, we lack concepts for measuring progress in refugee employability and knowledge about which types of intervention enhance employability. We draw on research on employability and have developed a survey-based concept to measure different dimensions of refugee employability. We analyse how these dimensions predict employment outcomes among newly arrived refugees in Denmark, primarily from Syria. We also investigate the extent to which Danish public integration programmes affect these refugees’ progress in employability. The analyses exploit six waves of survey data collected from 2017 through 2019 that measure the refugees’ employability on a quarterly basis. Several dimensions in our concept of employability correlate positively with subsequent employment—primarily the refugees’ ‘conscientiousness and participation’, ‘health and coping’, and ‘job focus’. The analyses also show that participation in job-oriented programmes enhances refugees’ progress in employability—in particular the dimensions ‘conscientiousness and participation’ and ‘health and coping’.