Building skills and upgrading jobs go together

The joint Cedefop and Eurofound report is based on the two Agencies' 2019 European Company Survey and shows that managerial approaches cultivating skills utilisation, driven by a culture that values employees as an asset to the organisation, lead to improved establishment performance.

At the Cedefop virtual get together, experts from the two Agencies presented the report, demonstrated why workplace wellbeing is central to the mechanism linking human capital utilisation to business outcomes and made the case for people-centred managerial approaches.

Welcoming participants, Cedefop Executive Director Jürgen Siebel noted that the report's findings are crucial for two reasons:

• They help us uncover how skills contribute to organisational performance.
• They show that when we implement vocational education and training (VET), skills and employment policy, we need to do two things in parallel: target skills supply and promote the use of skills in jobs.

'Building skills and upgrading jobs go together,' he stressed, adding that the European Year of Skills is an opportunity to kick off a decade of investing in people and jobs, by meeting their learning potential, via upskilling and reskilling and by making work more enriching.

Eurofound Executive Director Ivailo Kalfin pointed out that high-quality jobs, offering strong motivation and commitment to workers as well as increased productivity to businesses, are tightly intertwined with skills development.

The event was concluded with a panel discussion of the report's main conclusions by representatives from academia, social partners and policy-making.

Virtual get togethers are a fresh event format that Cedefop is rolling out to put skills in the spotlight in the context of the European Year of Skills that begins on 9 May. They are designed to be a creative, less formal platform or knowledge sharing, discussion and debate with VET and skills experts, policy-makers, social partners, practitioners and other stakeholders.