Strengthening skills anticipation and matching in EU countries

published: 04-05-2020

Ensuring that EU countries develop robust skills anticipation to inform responsive VET systems is a key pillar of the Skills agenda for Europe. But to have an impact, skills intelligence requires good skills governance, feeding into VET and employment policies with wide outreach to diverse potential users.

In 2015 Cedefop initiated a country support scheme to assist the EU strategy of improving skills governance in its Member States. Cedefop has recently concluded four skills governance country reviews in Greece, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Estonia, following pilots in Malta and Iceland.

A significant contribution to report, research and services was provided by a contracted consortium, consisting of the Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini, Economix, Panteia and Cambridge Econometrics, in collaboration with contracted national experts. Panteia coordinated the contribution of the consortium in Bulgaria and Slovakia. Besides general contributions to methodological development, the main contribution of the Panteia team (Paul Vroonhof and Gert-Jan Lindeboom) in all countries was the implementation of a Delphi study. The opinions of experts and stakeholders were asked, analysed and fed back with substantiated conclusions. After focusing on areas where consensus seemed feasible, two follow-up rounds further elaborated possible follow-up steps that are needed to better equip governance systems and develop concrete policies for an even more responsive, future-oriented system of professional skills development. The results are included in the Roadmap.

Currently, the reviews and resulting Roadmaps of Greece and Estonia have been published.  

The first report published on such a review summarises key insights of the skills governance review in Greece. In recent years Greece has developed an innovative mechanism for labour market diagnosis, to design informed skills and employment policies. This report, and the consensus-[INVALID]d policy roadmap developed, provides further direction so that timely skills intelligence can strategically support Greece’s recovery to sustainable economic growth and competitiveness.

You can find the report here

The second completed review is about Estonia. There is already a relatively very advanced system of skills anticipation in Estonia, called OSKA. The report summarizes the key insights and lessons learned from the Skills Management Assessment in Estonia, focusing on the OSKA skills anticipation system of the country. The evaluation analyzes stakeholders' perspectives on results so far, identifies development opportunities and provides a roadmap with several specific actions. An important element was to set priorities in a large number of development opportunities and the feasibility - technology, budget, data quality and cooperation of partners played a major role in this. The roadmap thus builds on OSKA's successes and strike a balance between ambition and feasibility in managing the high expectations of stakeholders for the future development of the system.

You can find the report here

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