A Union of Skills - Glass half full or half empty?

Yesterday, on 5 March, Commission EVP Roxana Minzatu presented her first flagship initiative, the Union of Skills.

First of all: the fact that the Commission is treating the #TalentShortage as a priority topic is an important signal to all. This is the lever to improve #productivity and #competitiveness in Europe.

The actions are centered in 4 Pillars:

• Building Skills ( = initial education);
• Upskilling & Reskilling ( = training workers);
• Circulating Skills ( = intra-EU mobility); and
• Attracting, Developing & Retaining Talent ( = 3rd country talent).

Each of the pillars contains a number of announced actions, to be further detailed in the months and years to come.

None of the proposed actions in the Commission Communication are irrelevant. They will all undoubtedly contribute to alleviating the #labourmarket challenges we face, and so I would fully support most if not all of what is proposed in this agenda.

But the Commission is not in an easy position. Education and training is largely a Member State competency.

This Union of Skills is in part defined by what is NOT there. I fear that this is not the Game Changer that European Labour markets need.

The Communication quotes a statistic that as Adecco Group we have been mentioning for a while now: In 2022, general government expenditure on all levels of education was 4.7 % of GDP (EU average). 0.1 % of GDP was spent on adult learning. That discrepancy does not match the commonly accepted ideas we have today on the importance of lifelong learning. Addressing this requires bold strokes, and a joint commitment by EU Member States to significantly step up the public investments in adult learning.

At the Adecco Group, we have called for public investments to reach at least 0,5% of GDP. The Union of Skills falls short of suggesting a joint target. This is a missed opportunity.

In addition to this overarching challenge of funding, there is a number of other elements that would have deserved more attention:

• Activation: In addition to training worker and attracting foreign workers, there is another pool of potential workers that we should tap into: those who are currently outside of the labour market. The Union of Skills does speak about allowing ageing workers to work longer, which is a good point. But we should also look at enabling more people with care duties to fit work into their lives, supporting people with a disability, or integrating refugees and migrants into the labour market much earlier.
• Enabling company investments: The Commission does speak about using EU funds more effectively for re- and upskilling, and suggests actions to motivate companies to engage in more training. One additional action that we would suggest is to change financial and accounting requirements so that companies can book off education and skills as a true investment, similarly to investing in automation to drive up productivity.
• We know from experience that providing career guidance can make a tangible difference in the orientation, uptake of training, and career outcomes. Policy makers should ensure that workers, but particularly people at risk of job displacement should have better access to Career Guidance services. This is an area where public employment services and private employment services can and should collaborate closely.
• When companies go through restructuring or enter staff into short-time working schemes, for example due to the effects of the Digital and Green Transition, re- and upskilling need to play a most prominent role. This is first and foremost a responsibility of social partners. They should be encouraged to include (financing for) career guidance and skilling as basic support measures for all workers in social plans, or even earlier, in regular CLA’s. When deciding on whether to validate or declare generally binding the outcome of any collective bargaining, labour ministers should take this element into account more strongly.

The coming weeks and months, I will work together with my 德科集团 colleagues, as well as our allies at World Employment Confederation-Europe and BusinessEurope to continue advocating for the strongest possible approach to tackling the skills gap. Only this way we can truly Make the Future Work for Everyone.