Debate: European Skills Agenda for sustainable competitiveness, social fairness and resilience
Date: MONDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2021
Speaker: Nicolas Schmit
Language: EN

You rightfully asked about the progress we made in implementing the European Skills Agenda. The agenda was adopted by the Commission on 1 July 2020. It is a five-year plan to help Europe develop more and better skills and to put them to good use. Since last July, 7 of the agenda’s 12 flagship actions have already been launched. Such actions include the Council recommendation on vocational education and training which we already had the pleasure of discussing in this House. We have also launched the new Europass platform. The remaining five actions will be launched in 2021, notably the initiatives on Individual Learning Accounts and on micro-credentials.  The agenda is centred around inclusive learning. It is vital to address this point across all actions, for example in the Council recommendation on vocational education and training. We also underlined the importance of digital skills, and digital education and training. This is even more fundamental in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore the digital education plan for 2021-2027 adopted on 30 September 2020 puts forward inclusion as one of its guiding principles. We are also working on the Skills for Life initiatives to reach out to the most vulnerable and to create concrete opportunities for engaging with learning. Our ambitions will fail to reach that goal if we collectively do not invest. We need to make the best use of the unprecedented funding of the Union budget to tackle the economic and social consequences of this crisis. This includes of course the European Social Fund+ which can now be implemented following the agreement in trilogue between Parliament and Council’s negotiators very recently. Additionally, the Commission has encouraged Member States to use the Recovery and Resilience Facility where one of the seven flagship initiatives for reforms and investments is re-skill and upskill.  The European Parliament has played a central role in strengthening the position of education and skills in the legal framework of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. I thank you for that as there can be no recovery and no resilience if we do not ensure adequate investment in skills and in quality jobs, especially also in the transition from one job to another. Member States should put a strong emphasis on investment in skills in their national recovery and resilience plans, but we are working now with Member States to make sure that upskilling and re-skilling is a top focus area. This is not all. Skills are a shared responsibility and it is essential for everybody to play their part. This is why we will put in place a number of measures to unlock private investment in skills. We will look at how fiscal frameworks can do better to support reforms and investment in skills, and how enterprises could better report on their employees’ skills development.  All these efforts culminate in the Pact for Skills, which Commissioner Breton and I launched on 10 November 2020. The pact represents a shared engagement model for skills development. Partnerships should be created in order to respond to the skills challenges in different sectors and should involve social partners, too. To date, three skills partnerships are already in place and altogether EUR 11 billion have been committed by partners in industrial ecosystems to upskill their workforce in the coming years.  Yes, the question of helping Member States to align their national education systems with the labour market is an important one. Of course the organisation and content of education and training is a matter for the Member States, but targeted and up-to-date skills intelligence can help align training with evolving labour market needs, as well as support individuals in their choices. As part of the Skills Agenda the Commission, in cooperation with Eurostat and the EU Agency Cedefop, is improving and making more widely available such skills intelligence at regional and sectoral level. Let me give you just one example. A Big Data initiative using artificial intelligence has analysed over 150 million job vacancies across Europe. This is an example of assessing skills needs in real time. The results are already online and the Commission is disseminating our findings with key stakeholders such as the European network of public employment services and with social partners.  The Skills Agenda already in its name sets the path towards which we have to go: sustainable competitiveness, social fairness and resilience, and I know that I can count on this Parliament to go on this path.