Welcome to PezPod, our fourth episode.

My name's David Poyser, I'm a journalist, and today we're going to have another fun short chat

this time about how National Public Employment Services, or PEZ, improve their performance through

bench learning. This is where a team of experts from different PEZ and the PEZ network

suggests changes to national

PEZ after exchanging self-evaluation site visits, reports and that way they help

PEZ benefit from each other's experience. I'm very lucky to be with two experts who've done

the grassroots work on this. Firstly, Eric Offdodal. He's a sociologist currently giving strategic advice to the

head of the Norwegian Peas, and he's recently spent a long time writing bench learning assessments

going to Pez all over Europe, listening to Pez senior managers, and also to Pez staff at the

Colface in the regional offices. Hi, Eric. Hi. Great being here. I'm also very lucky to be with Renata Halblain.

She's now part of the senior management in Europe's largest Pairs, the BA in Germany.

But before that, she was based at the European Commission in Brussels for 18 months as project

leader for bench learning.

So she made probably 18 trips to different places all over Europe. So first, Renata, first of all, can you explain a little for PezPod listeners?

Were the visits fun?

Oh yes, of course they were fun.

It's really such a rewarding task to visit your fellows all over Europe and to find out about their organizations, trying to find

good practices, trying to see how people deal with the problems we all have when it comes

to helping the unemployed. And of course, it was fun because you were being terribly spoiled when you're on the side visits.

There's dinners, there's meals.

Everybody puts such effort into these visits.

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