The European Year of Skills has been a great start, but to make and shape a just twin transition, we need a skills revolution, and that takes much longer than a year, Cedefop Executive Director Jürgen Siebel told the meeting of Directors-General for Vocational Education and Training (VET).
The meeting was hosted by the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union in Seville on 25 and 26 October.
Mr Siebel presented the latest VET-related developments and laid out Cedefop’s view of policy priorities as they emerge during the European Year of Skills, focusing on:
- Flexible, inclusive, age-neutral and learner-centred VET is the only way forward.
Triggered by European cooperation and priority setting, countries are adapting and modernising their VET programmes and curricula.
The aim is to empower people to improve their skills and to engage in work, learning, and society. Programmes using the learning outcomes approach or new assessment methods are expanding. All this shows a clear shift towards more individualised, locally adapted, inclusive and flexible VET.
Cedefop has put the spotlight on microcredentials, outlining the opportunities – flexibility and transferability – and the challenges – quality assurance and trust.
- By way of better skills utilisation, companies, in particular MSMEs, can play a more active role in skills ecosystems.
We need to encourage and support companies, including MSMEs, to adopt a people-centred organisational culture and approaches that improve skills development and utilisation. Wherever not yet the case, workplaces must become loci of lifelong learning! This would improve company bottom lines and – ultimately – improve their contribution to skills ecosystems.
- User-centred skills intelligence helps translate trends and policy aims into actionable learning and matching opportunities.
Traditional skills intelligence on its own is no longer sufficient to map labour market and skills trends comprehensively and reliably, and for a non-expert audience.
We need next generation skills intelligence to understand and interpret labour market trends and emerging skills needs.
Cedefop has invested in piloting and rolling out real-time labour market intelligence, expanded its skills foresight capacity and developed innovative pan-European surveys.
