On March 19-20, 2008 IREX's Core Media Support Program and USAID Armenia's Social Protection Systems Strengthening Project, in partnership with CRRC-Armenia organized a training for the journalists entitled "Understanding and Reporting Labor Market Data." Thirteen journalists, mainly from the regions of Armenia were awarded certificates on the completion of the training.
The training included several presentations on Armenian and international (ILO) labor legislation, explanation of the key terms used in this sphere, official and unofficial statistics on the labor market, and a description of the sources of information on employment and unemployment in Armenia. The participants had a chance to gain hands-on skills for finding relevant information on the web, interpreting corresponding information and writing news articles. Among the presenters were Grigor Gyurjyan, Labor Economist, Hasmik Ghukasyan, Poverty Expert/Statistician and Anna Hovhannisyan, Legislative Liaison Expert at USAID Armenia SPSS Project and Leah Kohlenberg, Media Consultant at IREX CMSPA.
Within the two day training program, CRRC-Armenia Program Manager Arsen Aslanyan presented some findings on employment, unemployment and migration from CRRC's Data Initiative survey, and explained how those data were gathered, analyzed and interpreted, drawing the attention of the audience on the peculiarities associated with interpreting survey data. Gohar Khachatryan conducted a presentation on the peculiarities of online information, Web 2.0 tools and the way they affect media. Slides in Armenian can be accessed here.
You can find more information about the training on SPSS website here. Follow-up post with links to presentations is coming next.
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