Building on over a decade of experience in developing and disseminating skills intelligence, we bring together our analytical and research work to provide better and more synthetic evidence on current and future skills and labour market trends. We use narrative-driven visualisations to help policymakers and other skills intelligence users understand what is trending in occupations, sectors, countries, and skills.
Skills intelligence tool is built around two main pillars. The data part is powered by a set of indicators, which are the building blocks of skills intelligence visualisations. Indicators originate from various sources. Cedefop's research and analysis produce several datasets which we utilise: the Skills forecast, the European skills and jobs survey, and Skills OVATE. They are complemented by official statistics produced by Eurostat, such as the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS), European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and ICT usage in households and by individuals.
From all these sources, the skills intelligence team develops indicators - slices of data, providing a particular piece of information, such as future employment growth, unemployment rate, or digital skills level. This information can usually be broken down even further - most often by occupation, country, age, gender, or sector. The last part of our work is to design dashboards: narrative-driven sets of visualisations, bringing together the most interesting data on various topics, such as occupations, countries, sectors, or so-called themes, where we focus on areas of particular importance for Cedefop's work, like digitalisation and technology, skills and learning, or future jobs.
But data is just one part of the skills intelligence story. The other is qualitative content which we call data insights - building on the data, but also collecting evidence from reports and analyses on many topics. Data insights are short reports – usually between 10-15 pages – and they come in different collections. The skills anticipation collection covers 29 European countries and focuses on methods and tools, governance, target groups and other elements of skills anticipation in each of them. Occupation data insights investigate skills and employment trends and challenges in 33 occupations and also bring suggestions and examples of how VET should respond to those to stay relevant and attractive choice for learners.
Two shorter collections on sectors and skills and learning usually respond to recent developments with skills-related insights, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, or the inflow of Ukrainian refugees and workers since the Russian aggression.
The power of Cedefop's skills intelligence lies also in the meaningful connection of all the relevant content in one place. Take the example of a new thematic dashboard on digitalisation and technology: it features 4 key facts and 11 visualisations based on 7 indicators coming from 4 different datasets; 5 data insights; 5 publications; and links to 4 other dashboards.
Skills intelligence is a pinnacle of Cedefop’s work on skills and labour market analysis. While its reports and visualisations get a lot of attention from all kinds of users, it is important to give credit to extensive and exacting work that makes it possible and is often much less visible: from designing research ideas and data collection to quality control and user testing.
Take advantage of the wealth of data and information in our skills intelligence tool, and do not hesitate to provide us with feedback and suggestions on how to improve it further.
The skills intelligence team
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