When we recently polled our team at Talent Beyond Boundaries about the merits of New Year’s resolutions, the results were mixed. We settled instead on the benefits of setting an intention or a motto for the year. My 2024 motto is “You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf,” - inspired by my son, who has been learning to surf like a champion this summer (getting knocked off his board 99 times out of 100 but still going back out there). 

This year will be as unpredictable as any Australian surf beach wave set - with a marathon of pivotal elections, geopolitical turmoil, conflict-related violence, climate change's volatile impact and other human displacement drivers. Among all this uncertainty, there are two constants: the world’s largest economies are all experiencing aging populations and skills and labour shortages that cost an estimated $1.3 trillion annually. This is the wave TBB is learning to ride. By enabling refugees to migrate for work, we provide real solutions to displacement while helping resolve demographic and labour shortage challenges. We will know we’ve reached mastery when hundreds of thousands of refugees migrate yearly on these pathways - but we aren’t there yet. 

2024 will be a year of significant milestones for refugee labour mobility. Off the heels of the Global Refugee Summit, where refugee labour mobility secured very high-level commitments from states and other organizations, we will use that momentum to propel our work forward this year. 

We have ambitious goals over the next 12 months. These include: 

Opening new labour mobility pathways to more countries

We ended 2023 on a high note, with Canada committing to make its refugee labor mobility pilot program permanent by 2025, and Australia and the UK extending their programs. In 2024, in collaboration with our partners, we will roll out the Welcome Corps at Work program in the United States and launch new refugee labor mobility pilot programs across five European countries: Italy, Slovakia, Spain, France, and Germany. This expansion comes on the heels of the successful Displaced Talent for Europe (DT4E) program, carried out in conjunction with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which facilitated refugee labor mobility initiatives in Belgium, Ireland, and Portugal in 2023. Our overarching objective is to enable refugees to access skilled migration pathways to as many countries as possible. We are committed to launching new country programs each year to realize this vision.

Supporting refugees to access the pathways

At the same time, we’ll double down on our support to refugees accessing the refugee labour mobility pathways now in place in Australia, Canada, the UK, the US and Europe. This year, we will ensure that at least 1,300 refugees worldwide can access solutions to their displacement through these labour mobility pathways, with a significant strategic focus placed on outreach, particularly across Latin America and East Africa.

Refugee candidates who register on TBB’s Talent Catalog are supported in improving their language skills for jobs in the international market through our partnerships with Duolingo, Pearson, and the Occupational English Test. We are also increasingly working with education and training organizations like Coursera, Luminus Education and Re: Coded to provide refugees with access to technical upskilling to help them compete for high-skill jobs.

A race to the top for the private sector

We’re also deepening our global engagement with corporations — making significant strides with companies embracing hiring refugees. We’ve seen strong commitments to hire displaced talent from our key employer partners, such as Iress, Deloitte, and the NHS, to name a few. A growing number of businesses are looking to refugees as a source of talent. For example, FEMSA CEO Francisco Camacho Beltran recently announced on a panel with TBB and IOM at the World Economic Forum 2024 Annual Meeting that they are committed to hiring an astonishing 27,000 refugees by 2027. 

We’re confident that more private-sector employers will join this race to the top in 2024. We’re increasingly looking to businesses keen to hire in cohorts of displaced candidates - helping achieve economies of scale and large impact. To do this, we need to demonstrate positive results for participating businesses, and we will continue to monitor and learn from candidate and employer experiences when looking to engage future employers with displaced talent mobility programs. We know we’re on the right track - with vital positive feedback from employers who have hired displaced candidates through TBB programs. 

As part of our commitment to creating meaningful employment opportunities, we’re providing trusted employers access to the Talent Catalog so they can take the lead in their search for candidates. We’re also strengthening our partnerships with Fragomen and LinkedIn to broaden the scope of opportunities for refugees further and magnify our mission's impact. 

Multi-stakeholder leadership through the Global Task Force on Refugee Labour Mobility

Many years ago, TBB was a lone voice championing skilled migration for refugees. We are now part of a chorus of voices, and the Global Task Force on Refugee Labour Mobility expertly conducts the choir. 

This year, Australia will take over from Canada as the Chair of the Global Task Force on Refugee Labour Mobility. We’re also excited to work with members of the Refugee Advisory Council refugee-led organization Jumpstart Refugee Talent on the Task Force, who were appointed as a core member in 2023. 

Together, we made a bold multi-stakeholder pledge at the 2023 Global Refugee Forum to achieve the goal of 200,000 refugees arriving on labour mobility and education pathways in five years.  In 2024, we will work with the new Chair to translate this commitment into action while ensuring accountability among those who endorsed our shared cause.

Building the ecosystem of partners supporting refugee labour mobility

We know TBB cannot scale refugee labour mobility alone - far from it. To scale, we need an ecosystem of partner organizations visible to one another and connected through shared technology and data, enabling a vibrant marketplace where job matches can efficiently scale.

Many organizations are now committed to expanding labour mobility pathways for refugees through their programs, such as RefugePoint, International Rescue Committee (IRC), HIAS, Bosco, Catholic Refugee Services (CRS), International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and others. TBB has partnered with and helped to train many of these organizations. Importantly, we have given them access to the Talent Catalog to help facilitate job matching and mobility of refugees on labour pathways.

To support these partners this year, we will launch the  Displaced Talent Hub in March - a website and resource hub for partners learning how to run refugee labour mobility programs. Subscribe to our newsletter to be one of the first people to take a peek.

With such an ambitious agenda, it’s time to get surfing. 

You can follow our results throughout the year via our transparent Global Impact Dashboard and the updates we post in our TBB Newsletter.

Thank you for your support!