Skills intelligence research at the JRC, designed to support and inform the European Skills Agenda, is based on the idea is that technological transformations, together with organisational practices and public policies, shape production processes and occupational tasks. To the extent that such tasks (or their combinations) experience substantial changes, there is a need to ensure that workers are appropriately skilled to perform those tasks successfully.
Data from Online Job Advertisements (OJAs) and employer surveys can provide information on the ‘demand’ side of skills, while data from surveys of employees or large-scale skills assessments provides information on the ‘supply’ side of skills.
From a policy angle, the next step requires the identification of education and training policies that enable a good match between supply and demand, in terms of both quantity and quality. This is challenging to achieve, as it requires establishing a clear relationship between the skills used in the labour market and education and training content and pathways. For training and adult learning, the main issue is to identify what type of intervention is needed to reskill or upskill individuals.
The JRC undertakes work on skills intelligence under three themes:
- The relationship between skills and educational and training paths;
- Online job advertisement data, with a focus on digital skill intelligence; and
- The identification of what are referred to as “green skills”, to be understood as the skills demanded in “green jobs” (i.e. jobs that will be in high demand as a consequence of the Green Transition).
Related publications
Recent publications of the JRC on the theme of skills intelligence are both conceptual and empirical and include:
- A unified conceptual framework for tasks, skills and competences (2021)
- Benefits and limitations of online job advertisements (OJA) in the study of skills intelligence (2021)
- Analysis of trends in demand for digital skills using online job advertisement (OJA) data (2022)
- Conceptual work on non-cognitive skills (2021), and meta-analysis on the returns on non-cognitive skills (2021)
