Adressing skills deficiencies is a major concen and line of action at the EU level. Two newly-released reports bring new findings on this topic into the limelight.

An independent report for the European Commission, entitled “New skills for new jobs: Action now” calls for actions into four main areas in order to incentivise people to upgrade their skills, to better link education and training with the world of work and expectations of the labour market, to develop the right mix of skills for the latter and to better forecast the skilss that will be needed in the future.

In parallel, CEDEFOP, the Thesaloniki-based EU agency in charge of promoting VET, released a report on the “The skills matching challenge: analysing skill mismatch and policy implications”. The analysis discusses the features of the skill mismatch phenomenon and gives an overview of factors leading to it; analyses its economic and social costs; and argues that the issue should be taken seriously by national and European policy-makers alike.

Certainly, this is one of the major current challenges at the EU level, and is bound to remain a critical issue in the future as well.

CEDEFOP

European Commission