| Activity type | Online presentation and Q&A (2 hours) |
| Title | Webinar on COVID19 and LFS |
| Participants | Senior officials from the NSIs and other producers of official statistics (in principle, all interested could attend as this is a webinar) |
| Location | Online |
| Timing | 28 May 2020 |
| Activity code | C2.1_25 |
This activity was the first online regional event in STEP and comprised of a two-hour webinar to inform the participants on guidelines and recommendations from Eurostat and International Labour Organisation (ILO) on how to deal with the consequences of COVID-19 in labour market statistics.
The short-term expert went through the main definitions of labour market status in the labour market statistics and how to treat, for example, temporary absence from the labour market due to furloughs. The short-term expert answered questions from the participants.
This webinar was the first larger online activity in STEP. The webinar was conducted over Zoom. The participants could sign up online. Simultaneous interpretation was provided. There were small problems connected to people getting the right link to sign into the meeting. This was caused by the online registration procedure in Zoom. The online registration has therefore been abolished for future activities as it is actually easier for everyone if the NC sends an Excel file with the registered participants. Some of the countries (Azerbaijan and Armenia) had several people gathered together in one room as opposed to individual connections. This works well as the participants can discuss the content among each other (however, the participants need to agree on the language). Altogether, there were actually around 30 participants from the partner countries.
The six partner countries are now informed about how to treat the consequences of COVID-19 in the labour market statistics according to the recommendations laid out by Eurostat and the ILO. The participants welcomed this initiative and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to go through the recommendations from Eurostat and ILO. Furthermore, according to the participants, most of the logistics (sound, picture, presentation, interpretation) worked well once the meeting had started.
