EU Skills Agenda
Boosting human capital, employability and competitiveness

With the Skills Agenda, launched in June 2016 and initially called New Skills Agenda for Europe and currently mostly referred to as EU Skills Agenda, the European Commission proposes to address a number of specific problems on the labour market. The initiative should boost human capital, employability and competitiveness in the EU.

The three main topics of the EU Skills Agenda are:

1. providing the skills the economy needs;
2. making skills transparent for employers;
3. understanding the skills needs of tomorrow.

The EU Skills Agenda names three groups of skills:

1. generic skills
2. professional skills
3. social-emotional skills

Read more about the Skills Agenda on ec.europa.eu.

Target groups

LOASA is probably the very first Erasmus+ KA2 project that aligns with the EU Skills Agenda (initially reffered to as New Skills Agenda for Europe). By embedding generic skills, professional skills and social-emotional skills in our ECVET units of learning outcomes, we serve three target groups:

1. Students with skills on lower and middle levels (roughly EQF levels 2, 3 and 4);
2. Excelling students who seek additional challenge (in the context of fostering excellence on all EQF levels);
3. Employers who need transparency of skills and want to have the skills of their current employees validated.

Ad 1: The importance of generic skills and social-emotional skills such as persuasion, creativity and emotional intelligence will increase compared to specific professional skills. It is expected that in 2025 many professional skills will no longer be performed by people due to the fourth industrial revolution. Social skills are less likely to be taken over by machines and will help workers to move between sectors. This is particularly important for the 68 million people in the European Union with skills on lower and middle EQF levels.

Ad 2: When the generic skills, socio-emotional skills and professional skills are included in the use of learning outcomes, we can simultaneously deploy them to foster excellence on multiple EQF levels (even at levels 3 and 2) with a curriculum that’s demonstrably expanded or upgraded to a higher level.

Ad 3: A good connection between employment and education begins with speaking the same language. The EU Skills Agenda helps. By co-developing ECVET units of learning outcomes with industry and education partners, and embedding generic, professional and social-emotional skills, employers will gain a better understanding of the skills of their current employees and graduates who enter the labour market.