By presenting last February's rapport “New Skills for New Jobs: Action Now”, the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth sounded the alarm when he indicated that one third of working-aged Europeans do not have formal qualifications; those from initial or further studies.
The most tangible and worrying consequence concerns the difficulty of finding a job. In fact, for a non-qualified individual, the chances of finding a job reduce by 40%.
This issue can be approached in a more positive way, so it can be noted that the higher the level of qualification, the more realistic it is to find a job: 84% for highly-skilled workers; 70% for average-skilled workers; 49% for those with lower-level education.
The fight for professional qualifications, lead by the European Commission in Lisbon since 2000, is continuing in a more difficult context nowadays bearing in mind the financial crisis that we are experiencing and the increasing power of up-and-coming economies like China, Brazil and India.
With the development of globalised exchanges, these economies put pressure on our company's competitiveness and provide a strategic factor to skills development for the future of the European economy.
To add difficulty to this problem, it must be pointed out that in Europe, the challenge of professional qualifications is caused by two unfavourable facts: A demographic decline and an unprecedented retirement of older workers.
This fixed reality generates, depending on the activity sector, a loss of skills (cf. Blog 5th December, 2007 on the study of nuclear energy in France). Such a loss risks slowing down the economy and sustaining a heightened unemployment rate of 10% within Europe.
Aviane Bulgarelli, Director of CEDEFOP (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training) has provided the following forecasts from these facts and analyses: job offers available in the up-coming 10 years, will demand a higher level of skill and knowledge and will represent 42% of all jobs by 2020.
As the motto goes, drastic times call for drastic measures. The new Slovak European Commissioner in charge of Education and Training, Mr Maro Sefcovic, has launched 4 action plans:
- Increase all-round skill levels
- Offer appropriate skills to market needs
- Anticipate, define and structure required skills with new professions
- Innovate upon educational plans, instrument result measuring, evaluation of ROI, implement new, post-training skills validation certification.
Europe has a lot at stake with this situation: its place in a 21st Century world.
All broadcast, purchase, management and operational knowledge operators have to bring their contributions to the table of this considerably-sized situation in order to have a successful outcome.