Next generation skills intelligence for more learning and better matching

• June 21, 2024
• admin

This policy brief by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) examines the European Union’s skill anticipation trends, opportunities, and challenges, emphasising the need for robust skills intelligence to support vocational education and training (VET) and better match skills with labour market demands.

The brief underlines the necessity of diverse methods to capture complex skill trends and the importance of integrating skills intelligence into well-functioning skills ecosystems. Effective skills anticipation involves stakeholder collaboration and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to create actionable insights for policy and practice.

The policy brief concludes with a series of recommendations to support effective skills anticipation and intelligence:

• It is necessary to maintain a strong political commitment to avoid weak institutional frameworks, slow funding responses to new priorities, and lack of expertise.

• Facilitating the advancement of skills anticipation methods and tools is crucial to continually enhance our understanding of evolving trends in work and learning

• The existing skills anticipation methods and tools must be coordinated with each other to produce useful results

• Stakeholders need to be mobilised to engage with one another horizontally, vertically, and across geographical areas to highlight societal challenges

• Not only must there be collaboration in the creation of skills anticipation, and intelligence, but there must also be cooperation in the actions based on these insights

• Stakeholders need to be aware of the benefits of making use of Big Data and AI in skills anticipation, as well as of their limitations

• Giving stakeholders a seat at the table and opportunities to contribute and voice concerns leads to skills anticipation that supports skills formation and matching systems in becoming fairer and more inclusive