The Beauty of Brussel's Skills Vision

The European Year of Skills will give a fresh impetus to lifelong learning, empowering people, and companies to contribute to the green and digital transitions, supporting innovation and competitiveness.  

Having a workforce with the skills that are in demand will contribute to sustainable growth, lead to more innovation and improve companies' competitiveness globally. The European Year of Skills 2023 will help companies, in particular small and medium enterprises, to address skills shortages in the EU. It will promote a mindset of re-skilling and up-skilling, helping people to get the right skills for quality jobs. The green and digital transitions are opening new opportunities for people and the EU economy.

Skilled workers will enjoy better job opportunities and fully engage in society. This is key to ensure that the economic recovery as well as the green and digital transitions are socially fair and just.  

Abodoo have been collaborating with a number of government, enterprise, and educational organisations in the area of skills mapping and skills gap analysis to ascertain the current level of skills within regions, companies and in understanding the need of curriculum to match the skills needs of industry.

EU initiatives to support skills development

For the European Year of Skills, the EU will build on many ongoing initiatives, including:

• The European Skills Agenda is the framework for EU skills policy cooperation and will continue to help individuals and businesses develop skills and to apply them.
• The Pact for Skills: with 1,000 members and 14 large-scale partnerships in strategic sectors, there are pledges to help up-skill up to 6 million people.
• The Council Recommendations on Individual Learning Accounts and Micro-credentials help people to update or complete their skill-sets in a more flexible and targeted way.
• The EU Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition tackles the digital skills gap by bringing together all relevant partners to raise awareness and encourage training to boost digital skills.
• The European Digital Skills and Jobs Platform launched under the Connecting Europe Facility offers information and resources on digital skills, such as a self-assessment tool.
• The Structured Dialogue with the EU Member States on Digital Education and Skills discusses how to bring new digital technologies to education and help to improve digital skills.
• The New European Innovation Agenda proposes a flagship initiative and set of actions to create the right framework conditions for our talents.
• The European strategy for universities proposes several actions to develop high-level and future-proof skills for a wide range of learners, including lifelong learners.
• The roll-out of an EU Talent Pool and of Talent Partnerships with selected third partners will help match the skills of candidates to work in Europe with labour market needs.

A key area of focus for the European Commission this year and up to 2026 is Deep Tech.  For Europe to be successful it needs to take responsibility not only for promoting the development of breakthrough technologies, but also for developing the human talent, the scientific entrepreneurs, that can bring these technologies to the market. 

We can see below that traditionally, the Nordic countries have invested more heavily in deep tech than the rest of Europe.  It is expected that there will be a significant shift in this regard over the next three years however  - with other countries committed to greater levels of investment in the area of deep tech. 

“We need much more focus in our investment on professional education and up-skilling. We need better cooperation with companies, because they know best what they need. And we need to match these needs with people's aspirations. But we also have to attract the right skills to our continent, skills that help companies and strengthen Europe's growth.”

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

Abodoo is looking forward to working alongside the European Commission on several key projects to promote The European Year of Skills 2023. We are here to support you to help maximise the opportunities the European Year of Skills will bring: from a funding perspective, integrated learning or more simply for you to understand the skills of your employees and your future skills needs. 

By

Vanessa Tierney and Fiona Whelan

Abodoo CEO and Director of Education and Skills

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Who we are

Abodoo is a skills technology company transforming future learning and lives. 

What we do 

We provide governments and educational institutions, skills software and actionable insights that can bridge the digital divide, empower individual lifelong learning paths and ensure greater inclusivity for the future of work.

How we do this

We achieve this through mapping skills at a macro and micro level, recommending individual learning paths, providing access to unlimited educational providers, implementing an automated inclusive skills matching for marketplaces and giving actionable insights for future skills investment. All of our solutions can be integrated and provided in a white labelled capacity.

For more information: [email protected]

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