Equipping Europeans with the skills needed for tomorrow’s labour market
The way we work is constantly changing. Technological change, international trade and industrial transformation are three major factors that have shaped the labour market across Europe in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
What will the future of work look like?
There is a need to forecast change and to develop a skilled workforce that is aligned with and can adapt to this transformation. To prepare for change, people must also be given the right access to training and education. In addition, policies are needed to help the European workforce mitigate the changes. To address these issues, the EU-funded PILLARS project is providing policymakers and the public with information about what kind of (new) skills will be in demand and how to revamp education and training systems in creating the opportunities to acquire them.
Skills and their labour market potential
Researchers analysed Germany’s apprenticeship system that is both praised and modelled after worldwide. They identified over 13 000 cognitive, social, digital, manual, management and administrative skills acquired during apprenticeships. Using the results together with data spanning nearly 30 years, the research team examined the economic value of peoples’ early career skills throughout their working life. It has long been clear that the skills acquired early in someone’s career no longer will see them through to the end of their career life. They have to reinvent themselves several times along the way just to stay current. However, the skills learned early in a career will boost earnings throughout an entire working life, as shown in a working paper. Vocational education, which typically imparts skills early in a person’s career, can have a long-lasting positive impact. Further analysis in a journal article found that training later in a career path is effective in producing the skills that are in demand in the labour market. This can also ensure the participation of the elderly in the labour force. To identify which technologies will be relevant in the future, PILLARS is conducting a global survey involving about 200 000 experts. Having such knowledge enables to design training curricula at an early stage for all professions that employ new technologies, irrespective of the sector. Doing so will give the labour force the complementary skills needed for new technologies.
Harnessing new data for future skills needs
Project partners are using unconventional data, such as online job vacancies, and combining it with sound economic understanding. “This allows us to better understand global and structural changes in labour markets,” explains project coordinator Oliver Falck, director of the ifo Institute’s Center for Industrial Organization and New Technologies in Germany. A workshop in March 2023 further explored this type of data. It was agreed that the quality of new and often unstructured data must be carefully scrutinised and critically reviewed. This is because it is not subject to previous quality control and processing by bodies such as statistical offices. As a result, much effort is required to grasp the data and to determine which analyses and conclusions are possible based on this kind of data. “Studying adaption processes to new technologies and structural change in the past, together with understanding technological progress, offers several insights,” concludes Falck. “Primarily, they shed light on how future adaption processes in the labour markets function, and how they influence and guide education policymakers and regional policymakers, as technologies are often clustered in a region.”
Keywords
PILLARS, skills, labour market, training, education, career, work, workforce, apprenticeship, labour force