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Green job creation has enormous potential and is crucial to ensuring smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The case for government support to drive this forward is clear - industry cannot do it alone. Europe’s policy-makers need to ensure that their support for skills and training matches the focus and ambition of their strategies for promoting investment in green innovation and infrastructure. This European synthesis report on skills for green jobs brings together the findings from country reports covering Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Spain, France and the UK. In the future, almost every job will be a green job; thus, understanding the environmental impact of an occupation needs to be mainstreamed into education and training systems. New, greening and restructuring/retraining case studies show that integration of sustainable development and environmental issues into existing qualifications is much more effective than creating new training standards.

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Reviewing current research literature and presenting new empirical findings, the contributions in this book reflect the ways in which retirement and an ageing workforce are at the intersection of key social changes over recent decades. It addresses the question of what factors enable, or hamper, people to continue working at advanced age; it aims to provide sound and accessible evidence and suggest innovative ways of thinking to support active ageing policies. The book is divided into four parts. By examining emerging career development concepts and learning frameworks for ageing workers, the first part gives a broad view of the subject matter. The second part provides perspectives from comparative cross-national research on ageing, learning and working in Europe. The third part identifies ways of breaking traditional patterns to extend working lives and to assist working beyond retirement age. In the final part, active ageing is approached by considering the role of guidance and employer-supported initiatives. This publication conveys two crucial messages. First, successful active ageing requires commitment and involvement from ageing workers themselves and employers, in a context that supports learning and recognises the specific needs of ageing workers. Second, sustainable labour-market participation at advanced age cannot be achieved without sound understanding of ageing, working and learning and the interconnections between these processes.

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In modern societies, qualifications fulfil many functions. They serve to signal an individual's personal, social and professional status, but they also control access to education, training and the labour market. Moreover, these functions change in line with wider social changes. This Cedefop study aims to review changes in qualifications systems and indications of future trends in this field. There have been significant developments in qualifications systems over the last few years and there are signs that these structural changes are a result of pressure for more transparent and responsive qualifications. Covering a wide range of sources, including an overview of Cedefop's own work and case studies of several countries, it outlines four possible scenarios for developments in the next 10 years, and identifies the cornerstones for a reform strategy. Show less

This online newsletter information on vocational training issues at European level, including legislation and policy information, calls for proposals, news, and forthcoming events. Show less

Europe's challenge is not just to improve skill levels, but to match people with the right skills to the right jobs. Working life is becoming much more complicated. The information revolution is gradually dispensing with many jobs that had seemed to be a permanent fixture of our societies, while the jobs it generates need an ever-widening skill base. Consequently, it is becoming more difficult to find the right people for the right jobs. Skill-intensive economic and technological change is making the issue of skill mismatch more prominent. It's not just a matter of having enough skilled people in the economy as a whole, although that is an important condition. As with most things, however, the real problem lies in the details. The right balance between supply and demand also means that people need to be a good fit with their jobs. Although forecasted skill levels may be broadly in line, in 2020 the European labour market is likely to have a surplus of some skills and a shortage of others.

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This report presents CEDEFOP's work programme and priorities for 2010. The report discusses four medium-term priorities for 2009 to 2011: (1) informing European vocational education and training (VET) policies; (2) interpreting European trends in, and challenges for, skills, competences and learning; (3) assessing VET's benefits; and (4) raising the profile of VET. This work programme describes how CEDEFOP proposes to support European VET policy in 2010 by: (1) reviewing the policy background and indicating how CEDEFOP intend to develop its four priorities; (2) detailing activities and projects to show the expected outcomes and outputs of the projects and the indicators used to measure the performance; and (3) presenting an activity-based budget detailing the human and financial resources allocated to each project and activity. Show less

The European institutions, Member States and the social partners are working more closely together than ever before on achieving the Lisbon objectives and the learning agenda is top priority for European stakeholders to face the challenges of the European labour markets in the 21st century. Indeed, the European social partners are the foremost actors to enhance European cooperation in education and training. The research work aimed at exploring how the social partners on different levels are dealing with the priorities related to the Copenhagen process in education and training. The work was carried out evaluating 12 of the 27 Member States and six sectors by interviewing in depth almost 90 social partner's informants across European, national and sectoral levels. In addition, the outcomes confirm that social dialogue on education and training is playing a relevant role on development of [vocational education and training] VET policies at different levels. Nonetheless, social dialogue on VET and [lifelong learning] LLL issues is still a mechanism to be further explored and developed as a device to facilitate learning opportunities for European citizens.

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Demographic decline and the mismatch between the demand and supply of skills are two issues of particular concern for the European labour market. But are people’s skills more likely to be mismatched as they age? This is the topic of Cedefop’s latest research paper. As people age they are less exposed to physical risk at work but they are also less exposed to new developments, running the risk that their skills may not keep up with demand. A close study of the ways in which ageing workers’ skills fall behind workplace demands can suggest policies to overcome this problem. Issues discussed in the paper include: (1) how do the various forms of skills mismatch correlate to wages, job satisfaction, career prospects and health?; (2) are workers at different ages affected by different types of mismatch?; (3) does training help ageing workers deal with mismatch problems?; and (4) how do workplace conditions affect the match between skills and jobs?

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This leaflet highlights the most recent achievements in developing guidance policies, systems and practices in the [European Union] EU Member States. The key issues presented are largely based on the guidance policy review that Cedefop is jointly producing with the European lifelong guidance policy network (ELGPN). The policy review (to be published in 2011) will be a state-of-play analysis pinpointing areas where further development of national and European lifelong guidance will be required. The review will also detail implications for future work to support the European strategic framework for cooperation in education and training (ET 2020) as well as the European strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth (European Commission, 2010).

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By comparing national curriculum reforms and analysing learning programmes in logistics, this comparative study examines the use of learning outcomes approaches in curriculum development in nine European countries: Germany, Ireland, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and UK-Scotland. Based on an extensive literature review, interviews and surveys conducted with different stakeholders in curriculum policy-making and practice, the findings show how learning outcomes increasingly feature in [vocational education and training] VET curricula, influencing their development and changing their content and structure. The study reveals differences in the understanding and use of learning outcomes among countries and types of education and training. It highlights how developing curricula around the expected knowledge, skills and competences learners should acquire at the end of a learning process is seen as an effective way of bringing education and training closer to the needs of learners and the labour market in many European countries.

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