The Australian state government of Queensland developed a set of Skills Formation Strategies as a new way to respond to skill shortages and mismatches.

The conference discussed the results of the project as well as policy recommendations on training and skills development for the creation of an innovative and competitive SME sector in OECD countries.

This paper looks at a study carried out among 80 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in two Canadian cities, Montréal and Winnipeg, based on a survey and case studies, which show the importance of innovation among Canadian SMEs. These innovations in turn create new demands for skill development, both through formal training and in informal activities.

The London Apprenticeship Campaign was launched in 2010 to boost the number of apprentices in London. It was developed as part of an ongoing policy focus to tackle long-standing skill shortfalls in the city, shortages which have been constraining employment, social opportunity and productivity.

Germany is one of the OECD countries with the lowest barriers to immigration for high-skilled workers. However, long-term labour migration is low in comparison with other countries.

Unemployment in OECD countries will remain high through 2014, with young people and the low-skilled hit hardest, according to a new OECD report.

This book focuses on the role of employment and training agencies in contributing to job creation and productivity in Northern Ireland. It explores how Northern Ireland is implementing labour market and skills policy and putting measures in place at the local level to stimulate quality employment, inclusion and growth.

The low-skilled are more likely than others to be unemployed, have bad health and earn much less, according to the first OECD Survey of Adult Skills. Countries with greater inequality in skills proficiency also have higher income inequality.

LEED and Cedefop organise the second edition of the Green Skills Forum which will bring together experts in innovation, employability and skills development and lessons from work conducted by the OECD, Cedefop, and other organisations on the implications of the green economy for skills development and training policies.

Closer collaboration between local employment, training, and economic development agencies to develop the right skills in jobseekers is crucial to support export-oriented growth in Northern Ireland, according to a new OECD report.

Canada has experienced solid economic growth since the global crisis, allowing it to reverse recession-induced job losses and put federal public finances on a sound footing, says the OECD. Growth is expected to accelerate from 2.5% this year to 2.7% in 2015.

Korea has made significant progress towards decentralising the management of employment and training programmes, but can still do more to create stronger links with employers at the local level, according to a new OECD report.

Both generic and specialised ICT skills are becoming an important requirement for employment across the economy as the Internet becomes more engrained in work processes, but a significant part of the population lacks the basic skills necessary to function in this new environment. This paper examines the impact of the Internet on the labour market in this context.

U.S. employers are demanding skilled workforces, but are not always able to find a local supply, says a new OECD study looking at Job Creation and Local Economic Development.

Latin America’s GDP growth rate has slowed down in 2014, dropping below 1.5%. This is the first time in a decade that the region grows less than the OECD average, according to the OECD Development Centre, the Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean and the development bank for Latin America. Given the projections in the past weeks, any recovery in 2015 is likely to be challenging.

The WISE database provides a “one-stop” location to build up a statistical snapshot of skills development for each country. The database contains 64 indicators in five broad areas: contextual factors; skill acquisition; skill requirements; skill mismatch; and economic and social outcomes

The New Industrial Revolution affects the workforce in several ways. Ongoing innovation in renewable energy, nanotech, biotechnology, and most of all in information and communication technology will change labour markets worldwide. Especially medium-skilled workers run the risk of being replaced by computers doing their job more efficiently.

As the first edition of “Youth Skills day” unfolds, about 40 million youth aged 15-29 in OECD countries are either looking for work or entirely disconnected from the labour market and from education and training.

This report delivers evidence-based and practical recommendations on how to better support employment and economic development in Israel. Based on sub-national data analysis, it provides a comparative framework to understand the role of the local level in contributing to more and better quality jobs.

Countries where skills are less equally distributed tend to have higher wage inequality. Putting skills to better use can help reduce wage inequality, by strengthening the links between workers’ skills, productivity and wages.

The work will seek to identify good practices for employer engagement in the areas of both developing and utilising skills, including setting up innovative workplace learning methods, designing effective employer partnerships with the employment and training system as well as financing mechanisms for employer-led training, including how best to reach SMEs.

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.

The fact remains that robots have persistently failed to imitate the most human of skills, such empathy, teamwork, relationship building, etc. While technology may be reducing the demand for some routine skills, it is simultaneously increasing the demand for more difficult-to-automate social skills.

7th annual expert meeting of the initiative on Employment and Skills Strategies in Southeast Asia (ESSSA) and GIZ/ RECOTVET Policy Dialogue - 7-8 October, 2015 - Sokha Angkor Resort, Siem Reap, Cambodia

In 2010, the G20 called for the development of a set of internationally comparable indicators of skills for employment and productivity for Low-Income Countries (LIC) as part of its Multi-Year Action Plan on Development. To respond to this call, the OECD has established the World Indicators of Skills for Employment (WISE) database in close collaboration with the World Bank, ETF, ILO and UNESCO

Agreeing on skill needs is fundamental to develop a coherent response to skills imbalances. This can only be achieved if information is disseminated to all stakeholders in a pro-active way. For this, in turn, there is the need for the developers of skills anticipation exercises to engage their audience more effectively

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.

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.

Older workers earn more than younger workers with the same skills. So what explains the lower return to skill among younger, less-experienced workers? Employers may need time to learn about (and reward) the true skills of young workers. “Experience and the returns to education and skill in OECD countries, Evidence of employer learning?” published in the OECD Journal: Economic Studies.

High-skilled jobs as an important driver of overall employment growth in the EU and the impact of high-skill job creation goes beyond the highly educated workforce. If European regions are very unequal in terms of high-skill intensity, they are converging slowly.

Youth who have disconnected from the education system and are not working or planning to return to training are at high risk of marginalisation. Review of programs and other initiatives to re-connect.

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.

Skills for growth: human capital composition and economic performance

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

Average wages can vary markedly between socio-economic groups (gender, native- and foreign-born; high-skilled and low-skilled parents; workers of different ethnicities; age). These differences between groups of workers contribute to high overall wage inequality.

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

A discussion on how can we reconcile the apparently contradicting views of labour market demand for soft skills versus technical job-specific skills.

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.

Today the OECD is launching a new project with JP Morgan and Chase Foundation to measure and analyse skills needs in a harmonized way across countries. Experts from various countries and fields of discipline are meeting at the OECD to discuss methodological issues involved in developing a cross-country indicator of skill needs. By informing policy, this new data tool will make strides towards addressing skill shortages.

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.

Recent fires in Fort McMurray draw attention to a town that has been a prime destination for internal mobility in Canada over the past decades. This post discusses the role that geographical internal mobility can play in improving the matching of skill demand and skill supply in a national labour market, while also noting some of the barriers to labour mobility and potential economic and social costs.

This study will analyse how selected local areas/industry clusters identify the specific skills needed to support green growth and how related skills policies and practices can be made more effective in supporting their provision and accelerating transition to a low-carbon economy.

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.

A more skilled population ahead: age or cohort effects? Evidence from PIAAC and the differences in policies approach.

The demand for soft skills is increasing, and recent evidence suggests that the supply does not seem to keep up. The benefits from further development of these skills go beyond better labour market outcomes, as soft skills have been shown to contribute to overall well-being.

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.

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.

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.