The International Labour Organization (ILO), through its PROSPECTS programme in Lebanon funded by the Government of the Netherlands, has piloted the SkillLab mobile application to deliver AI-driven skills profiling, career orientation, and job-application support to vulnerable Lebanese nationals and Syrian refugees. The PROSPECTS programme itself has been operational in Lebanon since January 2019 and is scheduled to run until December 2027, with career guidance and employment services delivered through implementing partners including Caritas Lebanon, AVSI, the Safadi Foundation, and The Lee Experience. The SkillLab component was introduced as a digitalisation initiative within this broader programme framework, with first references appearing in ILO reporting from May 2022.
SkillLab is a Netherlands-based social venture that has developed a technology platform employing multiple machine learning algorithms written in Python. The platform's core function is an AI-based skills assessment engine that determines which competences to query and adapts the duration and content of the assessment based on user responses. The system is built on the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) ontology, which contains 13,485 unique skills mapped to 2,942 occupations. Through the assessment process, the engine captures an individual's employable skills gained through professional, educational, and informal learning experiences, automatically generates and translates comprehensive skill profiles, and maps each person's unique skill set directly to occupations and career pathways. The platform supports 27 languages during assessment with automatic translation of outputs into host-country languages, a feature particularly relevant in the Lebanese context where beneficiaries include Arabic-speaking Syrians and Lebanese alongside other language groups.
The system architecture follows a microservices approach. The mobile application is built in React and is available on the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and as a web application. A separate React-based web interface serves career counsellors and employment service providers. The skill assessment engine operates as a Python-based machine learning service, while the backend infrastructure runs on Ruby on Rails hosted on Google Cloud Platform. These components are connected via APIs. SkillLab won the Google AI Impact Challenge and received support through the Google SDG Accelerator programme, which contributed to its technical development.
In the Lebanon implementation, Caritas Lebanon served as the primary implementing partner for the Akkar and North Lebanon regions. Caritas supported 500 Lebanese and Syrian individuals across three centres with a programme budget of USD 250,000 over a 10-month period during 2023-2024. The programme activities included SkillLab profile creation, career counselling sessions, awareness training on decent work conditions, on-the-job training, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), and apprenticeship placements. Training was delivered in groups of 25 participants across five sessions covering SkillLab onboarding, skills importance in employability, career counselling, interview preparation, personal development, and workplace rights. Participants were subsequently referred to TVET programmes, apprenticeships, or micro, small and medium enterprise employment opportunities, with graduates expected to receive Ministry of Education certificates plus Safadi Foundation accreditation.
The SkillLab tool enabled participants to identify previously unarticulated skills, generate professionally formatted and internationally standardised CVs in multiple languages, receive AI-generated career recommendations matched to their skill profiles, and understand skills gaps relative to desired career pathways. Career counsellors at Caritas reported that the tool facilitated a transition from one-on-one counselling sessions to more efficient group-based sessions while maintaining quality of career guidance. An earlier phase under the PROSPECTS programme, between March 2021 and February 2022, had supported around 40,000 severely vulnerable Syrian refugee families with multi-purpose cash assistance, alongside which 370 beneficiaries received skills and entrepreneurship training delivered under the Norwegian government-supported Skill-Up Phase II and the Dutch-funded PROSPECTS projects.
Lebanon hosts approximately 1.5 million Syrian refugees, representing the highest per capita concentration of refugees globally. The country has been classified as a fragile and conflict-affected situation by the World Bank, and a November 2024 World Bank report estimated the cost of physical damages and economic losses due to conflict at USD 8.5 billion, with real GDP growth cut by at least 6.6 percent in 2024. This context of economic crisis and large-scale displacement makes digital employment services and AI-driven skills matching particularly relevant for facilitating labour market integration of both refugee and host community populations.