Skills for Industry: Scaling-up Best practices and re-Focusing Programmes and Incentives

Submitted by Alina Danieles… on 28 October 2019

The publication, prepared by empirica GmbH on behalf of EASME under the service contract “High-Tech Skills for Europe – Scaling-up Best Practices and re-Focusing Funding Programmes and Incentives” (https://leadership2019.eu/), analyses the funding models of education and training programmes targeting the workforce at national and EU levels and the synergies between the different instruments, with a view to identify best practices. Scaling up the best practices will make them more successful and impactful, serving for improving funding programmes and incentives in the future. The presented findings and recommendations were discussed at a the High-level Conference 'Skills for Industry Strategy 2030', on 19-20 June 2019 in Brussels.

Considering the increasing demand for high-tech skills as a result of the digitisation of the economy and advanced technologies, the paper identifies as main challenge for policy design the growing skills gap that calls for innovative action in skills development training and in funding programmes for re- and up-skilling. Education and training systems in Europe need to respond to these new demands and develop appropriate and agile training offers and lifelong learning opportunities.

Analysing the funding landscape in EU through 70 high-tech re-/up-skilling initiatives out of 270 identified in ten leading Member States, the authors emphasize the need for vision, leadership and commitment, for scaling of proven success cases, as well as the need for new business and funding models. The authors use a matrix for classifying re- and upskilling initiatives, where analyzed good practice innitiatives are placed in four quadrants according to their impact in the labour market, their “relative share of learners” and “growth rate”, to derive recommendations for decision taking for scaling regarding the performance and growth potential of projects and initiatives in each of the four quadrants.

Please refer to the attached study for a thorough reading. 

The document was published on ec.europa.eu website here. © European Union, 1995-2019.

The information and views set out in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of EASME or of the Commission. Neither EASME, nor the Commission can guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this study. Neither EASME, nor the Commission or any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.