This blog post looks at the importance of assessing and anticipating skill needs as recent empirical literature warns about the negative impact that skills mismatch can have on individuals and economies as a whole.

Apprenticeships provide opportunities to build up new skills and knowledge both on and off the job. When they are of high quality, apprenticeships promote a smoother transition from school to work for young people, giving them a good start to their working careers.

Why are workers mismatched in the first place? Many, if not most, students choose a field of study based on what they want to become and do to earn a living. Yet almost four in ten workers end up doing something unrelated. This is sometimes by choice but not always.

Encouraging more people to continue to work later in life would help Denmark meet the challenges of its rapidly ageing population. The ratio of the population aged 65 and over to the working-age population is projected to increase from 30% in 2012 to 43% in 2050, according to a new OECD report.

Improving school-to-work transitions and ensuring better career opportunities for youth after labour market entrance are common goals in emerging and advanced economies as they can contribute to raising the productive potential of the economy and to increasing social cohesion. However, the challenges faced in achieving these objectives and the policies required vary between emerging and advanced economies.

The seminar was organised by IPRASE, provincial institute for research and educational experimentation, instrumental body of the Autonomous Province of Trento, the Autonomous Province of Trento and the OECD LEED Trento Centre. The seminar represented a first public reflection on the Trentino Multilingualism Plan within a national and international comparison framework, in view of future prospects.

We are looking for national and sub-national policies and initiatives for social enterprise creation and development. The focus will be placed on initiatives funded by the European Social Fund, by other EU funds and programmes, by Member States and sub-national authorities and NOT on examples of successful social enterprises.

The potential for automation is limited when it comes to social skills, which is why social skills are increasingly rewarded in the labour market. Technological change is shaping the future of work through, in part, a skill-biased effect on employment.

The webinars enabled serious discussion on the concept of ‘local economic resilience’ in an informal setting that facilitates interaction and questions. The format featured presentations from policy experts and a roundtable discussion with the audience.

Being able to directly measure all the above aspects would be extremely useful but economists and analysts usually face severe data limitations (e.g. small sample size, data comparability, measurement error etc.) and are, in many instances, forced to use second-best proxies to describe skills and build indicators.

The recent mental health reform is an important step towards better services for people with mental ill-health, but Australia needs to do more to help people with mild to moderate mental health issues at and into work, according to a new OECD report.

The OECD’s most recent ‘Investing in Youth’ country reviews identify three broad streams of solutions to provide disadvantaged youth with the skills they need and thus reduce the share of youth outside of education or employment.

More equal access to employment services and better co-ordination between the government and social partners could help disadvantaged laid-off workers get back into employment, according to a new OECD report.

The project will identify the policy levers and instruments that can be helpful in the design of strategies to accompany the transition to older local labour markets, and identify how national policy frameworks can best support these transformations.

OECD Employment and Labour Ministers meeting in Paris have underlined their commitment to boosting employment, particularly for young people and the long-term unemployed, tackling labour market inequalities and helping people with mental health issues find and stay in work.

The webinars will enable serious discussion on the concept of ‘local economic resilience’ in an informal setting that facilitates interaction and questions. The format will feature presentations from policy experts and a roundtable discussion with the audience.

Investing in Youth in Tunisia most important than ever, and the still relevance of the last Investing in Youth review 2014.

Latvia faces a huge demographic challenge. Since restoration of its independence in 1991, the country lost more than a quarter of its resident population.The report "Investing in Youth: Latvia" states that investing in youth, by upgrading skills and promoting employment, is a priority if Latvia wants to offer its young people a positive outlook and address the demographic challenge.

Regional disparities in the supply and demand of skills do exists in many OECD countries. Local level actors need to be equipped with the right tools and capacities to develop innovative employment and job creation strategies tailored to their local conditions.

Discussion on how technology helps measuring skills shortages in real time

Openness to change and a continuous questioning of the way we work are the keys to being prepared for the Future of Work. This advice comes from Mark Keese, Head of the Employment Analysis and Policy Division at the OECD, and we catch up with Mark following the OECD's Future of Work Forum in January 2016.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and J.P. Morgan through its Foundation today launched a new project “Adapting to Changing Skills Needs” to fill knowledge gaps in the assessment of skill mismatches and to identify international best practice in addressing them.

Australia should provide early access to more intensive employment services for disadvantaged laid-off workers to help them find a new job more quickly, according to a new OECD report.

The OECD LEED Programme launches this "Call for Initiatives" to extract what local authorities and other actors know works, what the new scenario is demanding and how equipped they are to respond. We are interested in learning from the experiences of EU member countries, the wider OECD area as well as other countries.

Sweden should address housing shortages, begin integration activities early, and improve the support for those with low skills to speed up the effective integration of refugees, according to a new OECD report.

11th edition of Trento Festival of Economics: the arena where economists, political and institutional stakeholders, researchers and journalists from all over the world, will exchange views and investigate the topic “Where growth takes place”.

A range of OECD analysis has been exploring the relationship between digitalisation, jobs and skills, the magnitude of potential job substitution due to technological change, the relationship between globalisation and wage polarisation, as well as the changes to the organisation of work. This post focused on a recent paper on Automation.

Ongoing innovation in technology is changing labour markets worldwide. To understand the future of work in the digital era, we need to move away from the traditional economic classification of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors.

Workers can be mismatched by qualifications while their skills are, in fact, adequate for their jobs. This situation, ‘apparent’ qualification mismatch is more common in certain fields of study than in others and speaks to the need of strengthening the links between employers, education providers and students to share information on the true skills, to avoid true skills mismatch.

When nearly a million Vietnamese “boat people” fled their country in the late 1970s and early 1980s and sought refuge elsewhere, they were typically seen as a burden and often turned away. Eventually, many were allowed to settle in the US. Most arrived speaking little or no English and with few assets or relevant job skills. Yet Vietnamese refugees are now more likely to be employed and have higher incomes than people born in the US.

Tax incentives are used widely across OECD countries to incentivise individuals to invest in education and training, but are they effective? Recent evidence from the USA highlights the risk of creating overly complex systems in which the embedded incentives are no longer fully understood by individuals. This carries an important lesson for other countries in designing their own tax measures for skills investments.

New research points to the role of field-of-study mismatch in explaining the long-term effects of cyclical labour market shocks. It suggests that policy effort ought to be directed not just towards the NEETs, but also towards youth who find employment during recessions, given their higher risk of prolonged field-of-study mismatch and lower wages if mismatch is accompanied by overqualification.

Today, the OECD publishes "Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills", the Second International Report for the Survey of Adults Skills, which covers a further nine countries and sub-national entities – Chile, Greece, Indonesia (Jakarta), Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia and Turkey– that collected data in 2014-15.

Although Lithuania’s growth has been impressive, inequality is high, the risk of poverty is one of the highest of European countries, and life expectancy is comparatively low and strongly dependent on socio-economic background.

In 2015 the Lithuanian government launched an ambitious Social Model reform agenda aimed at balancing flexibility of the labour market and security provided through the system of social protection.

This chapter analyses how skills are used at work, why skills use matters for workers and economies and its key determinants. It draws on data for the 28 OECD countries participating in the Survey of Adult Skills.

Despite unprecedented progress over the past century, gender gaps in the labour market persist throughout the world and are especially marked in emerging economies. While the quantity of jobs held by women has increased in many countries, female workers continue to have worse jobs than men.

The recently published Second International Report for the Survey of Adults Skills looks in detail at the extent to which proficiency in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments matters for the well-being of individuals and nations. The answer that emerges is clear: proficiency is positively linked to a number of important economic and social outcomes.

Despite unprecedented progress over the past century, gender gaps in the labour market persist throughout the emerging world and are accompanied by important skill gaps. Women tend to perform worse in STEM subjects, have lower financial literacy and business knowledge than men. The OECD Employment Outlook 2016 paints an up-to-date picture of gender gaps in 16 emerging economies and outlines a comprehensive set of policy recommendations.

The Netherlands should improve its policies to attract and retain highly skilled migrants in order to address labour shortages and strengthen its position as a knowledge-based economy, according to a new OECD report.

Low birth rates have become a pressing issue in Italy and many young Italians feel they do not enjoy the necessary economic stability to plan ahead and start a family. Education that matches the skill needs of employers leading to work-based learning in the form of apprenticeships can be useful to help young Italians plan ahead and to sustain the much needed increase in the birth rate.

The OECD has just released a new working paper by Thor Berger and Carl Frey which provides a systematic overview of the literature examining the impact of digitalisation on labour markets. The paper highlights some well-known as well as some lesser-known facts about digitalisation, deindustrialisation and the future of work.

The Regional School of Public Administration (ReSPA) has devoted its 9th Annual Conference to opening direct channels of discussion on experiences, methodologies and innovative practices in the process of optimization of public administration in the Western Balkans.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.3% in September 2016

OECD unemployment rate down to 6.2% in October 2016

This document describes and discusses a new supply side framework that quantifies the impact of structural reforms on per capita income in OECD countries.

Malaysia has sustained over four decades of rapid, inclusive growth, reducing its dependence on agriculture and commodity exports to become a more diversified, modern and open economy.

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.2% in November 2016

This paper provides a quantitative description of decoupling in OECD countries over the past two decades, with the results suggesting that it is explained by declines in both labour shares and the ratio of median to average wages (a partial measure of wage inequality).

OECD unemployment rate stable at 6.2% in December 2016